Too little, too late? Even if they backtracked 100% from day 1, the fact that they even thought this was going to be a tolerable idea shows that they're so horrifically out of touch from their...
Too little, too late? Even if they backtracked 100% from day 1, the fact that they even thought this was going to be a tolerable idea shows that they're so horrifically out of touch from their customer base.
Much like me and Microsoft, the trust is likely completely broken for a generation of game developers. I'll expect Unity to be a fraction of its former self inside of a decade.
I disagree, but as a game dev, I have a lot of mixed feelings. I still think that as a company, unity is not putting the devs first. But this whole situation has forced them to realize that they...
I disagree, but as a game dev, I have a lot of mixed feelings.
I still think that as a company, unity is not putting the devs first. But this whole situation has forced them to realize that they don't have as strong of a hold on the market as they thought.
Many high-visibility indie devs have jumped to Godot and aren't looking back. I still enjoy Unity's tools et but I'm being very cautious. In the past, I would have flatly assumed every new project would be Unity. Now, I've officially changed that so that each project will be a new assessment of every tool available.
With new leadership, and with such a sudden reversal of their sudden fee announcement, I have seen some shift back to their indie developers' best interests. If that continues in that direction, I will continue to lean towards Unity, since I know it so well.
That said, I'm always watching Godot's updates closely and will continue to learn it so that it will be easier to switch if a new project comes up that would be serviced well by it.
My advice to all other game devs is the same I gave when this whole situation first came up: use the right tool for each job and don't become trapped into one ecosystem. Your flexibility in engine choice will only help you as a dev.
After this, I really don't care how much Unity changes. They'd have to become FOSS for me to consider them. Unity had market share and a powerful host of features, at the cost of bugs and an...
After this, I really don't care how much Unity changes. They'd have to become FOSS for me to consider them.
Unity had market share and a powerful host of features, at the cost of bugs and an inevitable enshittification down the road. But now Godot has largely caught up in featureset, and said enshittification has caused Unity to squander its own market share, so why bother with it now?
Godot can do so much nowadays, all with more stability, and you can trust it not to stab you in the back later. I can't say the same for any for-profit company, least of all Unity. They've fallen off the trust thermocline, as far as I'm concerned. It would take a miracle for them to come back from this.
I wouldn't be that complacent. All FOSS promises is that you can take your ball and go home if/when that stabbing comes. It still depends on you being able to play ball if that happens, though....
and you can trust it not to stab you in the back later.
I wouldn't be that complacent. All FOSS promises is that you can take your ball and go home if/when that stabbing comes. It still depends on you being able to play ball if that happens, though. Unless you're willing to lie on the hopes some competent teams manages a fork (and the cycle repeats).
You can look at several high profile projects to see that those schisms still do irrevokable damage to the development, if not outright kill it off entirely. Red hat and GIMP are some of the biggest examples. There was another open source engine a few years back that basically split in 3 once the repo owner more or less privatized the original engine, and the splinters are nowhere near as stable as before.
What happened with GIMP? I don't remember anything major, and a quick Google search just turns up a fork named "Glimpse" due to complaints about the name.
What happened with GIMP? I don't remember anything major, and a quick Google search just turns up a fork named "Glimpse" due to complaints about the name.
ahh the naming controversy. That was bizarre and Glimpse is a bit of an example of that. But the events that stagnated GIMP are much older, and more nuanced and technical. There was no huge,...
ahh the naming controversy. That was bizarre and Glimpse is a bit of an example of that. But the events that stagnated GIMP are much older, and more nuanced and technical. There was no huge, distinct schism to point to.
(I'll give a disclaimer here that much of this is very opinionated, and that you may find others perfectly happy with GIMP as it is today).
As you're probably aware, GIMP is decently known in the art world but was clearly made with programmers in mind. So that disconnect between its features and usability meant it never properly rose as a tool industry would utilize.
The name has been a recent lampshading of why industry won't adopt it (literal bikeshedding), but it comes more down to the core development team. There were many designers, graphics engineers, and even artists over the decades willing to help modernize GIMP. But the core team seems steadfast in their current philosophy and architecture, and vision. It reminds me a lot of Blender pre-2.8, but that lead to a brighter future.
That can still be excused, but the fact of the matter is that the core team itself implements their own features at a snail's pace. They've made promises for features over a decade ago that is still on some backlog roadmap to this day. It's not really a team interested in expanding, nor open to feedback. That's another way to kill a community before it really starts.
There was a "core rewrite" promised for decades at this point, but no real tangible progress towards this, not even in concept. That also makes it less attractive to fork; because instead of trying to work with experienced maintainers to understand the old tech and how to build on top, you're going to be wandering in the dark with a mix of documentation and confusion on what and how they modified it before you can do anything. At some point it's better to just start from scratch.
On the UI end, their reliance on GTK probably slows down progress both internally and for adoption purposes. The issues with GTK can be its own (very caustic) topic, but as a slightly unsatisfying TLDR; it's not as widely used and doesn't necessarily have the best setup for quickly making modern looking designs.
It's hard to point to sources since a lot of this history is told through IRC chat rooms, heated Gitlabs/mailing lists issues (which you can look up, but it'll be a rabbit hole), and oodles of other conversation lost to time. But This Hacker News thread may help give an overview of various issues the community has, as well as giving a dissenting voice from mine that are fine with the direction. Keep mind this is from 7 years ago, so you have hindsight to further (dis)prove the notions had here.
I’m not a game developer, but I suspect there are people who think about it a little differently and make more tactical, shorter term decisions: there is no runtime fee for now, so they can make...
I’m not a game developer, but I suspect there are people who think about it a little differently and make more tactical, shorter term decisions: there is no runtime fee for now, so they can make games for now, and change to something else later if needed. After all, once a game is done, often game developers move on. The successes that last are rare.
When I was a Java developer, I didn’t worry too much about arguments that something could happen because it wasn’t open source. Eventually Sun did open source it, and a good thing, too, considering what happened with Oracle. Java lasted longer than my interest in it: I don’t write Java anymore when I can help it. That seems good enough?
Similarly, I’m comfortable using GitHub. I’m happy that alternatives are available if something happens and I hope they’re successful, but I don’t need to use them. Maybe Microsoft will mess it up someday, but so far it’s fine.
We don’t know the future and often things don’t last forever, but they might last plenty long enough.
If I was running a gamedev company, I certainly wouldn't re-do any current games in progress....but I'd almost certainly rethink building my next game on top of Unity. If I had delisted an older...
If I was running a gamedev company, I certainly wouldn't re-do any current games in progress....but I'd almost certainly rethink building my next game on top of Unity. If I had delisted an older Unity game for the original change, I'd consider bringing it back online as well...but I almost certainly wouldn't consider throwing that much more weight behind it.
I've been tinkering with the idea of making a game myself, and right now Unity is pretty close to the bottom of the list for the reasons stated. And indie games are the lifeblood of Unity.
My employer abandoned LastPass wholesale after the breaches. There's no evidence there would ever be another breach, but we weren't going to bank our reputation on that. I personally see "Unity implements disasterous pricing plan then abandons it when it proves disasterous" more akin to a company getting breached. It's not a hypothetical "what if it gets bad," like Java, it's a "omg they made it bad" like Oracle did with their JDK licensing changes. There's a reason that huge numbers of people aren't using Oracle JDK builds anymore, even though Oracle backtracked a good bit. Every one of our company's vendors that provided a Java product used to use Oracle's JDK, and now they don't. Oracle burned what goodwill they had for that product (though anybody who has interacted with Oracle won't trust them for anything other than squeezing blood from a stone).
The only people this really affects are those stuck with a mostly done project already in Unity. Anyone else choosing to go with Unity at this point is either unaware or doesn't care or thinks...
The only people this really affects are those stuck with a mostly done project already in Unity.
Anyone else choosing to go with Unity at this point is either unaware or doesn't care or thinks there's no better option (I don't think any of that is correct, but it is what it is).
For those stuck in purgatory, it might help them get their game out, but every smaller project i'm aware of has been stuck in a "well in theory we could port everything to another engine, in practice I'd rather just stop developing". This might give them an out of "we can now support the project until they do something else really fucking stupid".
Fee was announced with the intentions of being retroactive and applying to already released games, which... I'm not sure is even legal. There was also minimal communication with the PR department,...
Fee was announced with the intentions of being retroactive and applying to already released games, which... I'm not sure is even legal. There was also minimal communication with the PR department, because I remember a big hullabaloo when someone on their social media team stated that they'd expect Microsoft to pay the runtime fee for games on GamePass. Which they quickly backtracked, because obviously they'd never run that by Microsoft.
I think they doubled down on the question of whether developers would be charged for pirated copies or redownloads, which... You can guess how disastrous that would be.
I really can't emphasize how disastrous that whole announcement was. They started with the worst business announcement I've seen from any company in my lifetime (seriously, absolutely no redeeming parts to it), and kept digging the hole deeper. I felt so bad for all developers with released Unity games because it felt like they were trapped. The fact they were willing to try to implement that retroactively raises the question of what else they would try, which makes any game ever made with Unity a potential liability.
I'm not really sure it's fair to lump Unity as "they". The prior CEO pushed for it, it didn't work, he got yeeted, and a new CEO hired by the board is reversing it. This is also why CEOs are paid...
I'm not really sure it's fair to lump Unity as "they". The prior CEO pushed for it, it didn't work, he got yeeted, and a new CEO hired by the board is reversing it.
This is also why CEOs are paid handsomely, when they're bad, they can cause a lot of damage.
So the CEO had no actual consequences for running the company into the ground. I'm sure we will see Riccitiello at another high paying position in the next ~12 months. To be fair a lot of the...
So the CEO had no actual consequences for running the company into the ground. I'm sure we will see Riccitiello at another high paying position in the next ~12 months. To be fair a lot of the blame falls on the board, which is also largely immune to the consequences of failure.
It is very frustrating to see people failing upwards. Riccitiello also made a mess of EA.
When you are paid that much money, being fired doesn't really seem like a consequence. For the employees of his companies getting fired could mean losing a home, dipping into their retirement,...
When you are paid that much money, being fired doesn't really seem like a consequence. For the employees of his companies getting fired could mean losing a home, dipping into their retirement, loss of healthcare, or their children not being able to attend college.
When a CEO gets fired it very much feels like they just get a ten month vacation before they move on to the next role that pays them a million a year.
Perhaps the compensation of a CEO should be tied to the long term success of a company, even after they are no longer present. Not quarterly success - long term success.
It is. CEO comp is tied to company success in two ways: one is that much of it comes in the form of stock compensation. Two is that it is usually incentive gated behind performance metrics....
It is. CEO comp is tied to company success in two ways: one is that much of it comes in the form of stock compensation. Two is that it is usually incentive gated behind performance metrics. Remember the $46b pay package musk had? That was gated behind him 10x the market cap of the company over 5 years.
The former Unity CEO no doubt lost much in potential earnings by being yeeted when he was.
I mean, yeah. CEO's usually get hired already rich, and leave more or less rich but still plenty rich. They will never feel discomfort without gross mismangent of funds. But they can pay people...
When you are paid that much money, being fired doesn't really seem like a consequence
I mean, yeah. CEO's usually get hired already rich, and leave more or less rich but still plenty rich. They will never feel discomfort without gross mismangent of funds. But they can pay people money to make sure that doesn't happen.
I don't see what more you want to do to a CEO. The important part for Unity the company is that bad leadership is gone. There's not much point seeking vengence after that. They can sue the old CEO for damages, but incompetence is not a winning argument (again, for good reason. Can you imagine how that'd be exploited for senior employees who otherwise simply followed orders?)
Perhaps the compensation of a CEO should be tied to the long term success of a company, even after they are no longer present. Not quarterly success - long term success.
That's what stocks do, and I'm pretty sure CEOs keep a lot of stock even when fired. So technically their consequences are felt.
Due to the above reasoning of "enter rich leave rich", this won't have your desired effect, though. They could have all their stocks expunged (and again, it's a good thing they can't do that) and they would still live with more money than many of us will ever see
I guess the issue is in the volume of compensation. If you get 20 million in stock and decrease the value of the company by 50%, you still have 10 million. You can, I believe, even use the...
I guess the issue is in the volume of compensation. If you get 20 million in stock and decrease the value of the company by 50%, you still have 10 million. You can, I believe, even use the decrease in price offset the taxes you'd owe. Capital gains tax rates also cap out at 20% if they hold it for over a year.
The impact outside of the executives is felt immediately and severely. The impact to the executives is barely felt at all. If your salary is $400,000 / year and you have $20,000,000 in stock it doesn't really matter how badly you fuck up. You are going to be doing great afterwards regardless of your performance.
Meanwhile the rank and file may have had to feel the impact of your poor decisions in life impacting ways.
That's already the case, as significant parts of CEO compensation can be in company stock with sale timing restrictions. It provides exactly that incentive.
That's already the case, as significant parts of CEO compensation can be in company stock with sale timing restrictions. It provides exactly that incentive.
Interesting writing prompt detected: The CEO of a company hires the protagonist, a mercenary, to cover up the CEO's massive and illegal fuckup that, if discovered, would cost the company...
As in, did Unity claw back what they paid him?
Interesting writing prompt detected:
The CEO of a company hires the protagonist, a mercenary, to cover up the CEO's massive and illegal fuckup that, if discovered, would cost the company trillions. In this future, CEOs can have X% of their pay from the previous X-years with a company withdrawn, and turned into debt if it can't be repaid, so the CEO is particularly desperate to have the situation resolved.
Huh, so free version limits is higher and professional fees are higher. Which fee got removed exactly? On another note, I can't quite understand why people would go for unity with Godot being so...
Huh, so free version limits is higher and professional fees are higher. Which fee got removed exactly?
On another note, I can't quite understand why people would go for unity with Godot being so powerful these days (and for free). I guess the same goes for windows and gnu/Linux or ms office and libreoffice. Its what's teached in schools so its what stays used mainly on the job market
The runtime fee basically meant they would charge developers for each install of a game. Also, they planned to apply it retroactively to any best-selling games ever made with Unity. They also...
The runtime fee basically meant they would charge developers for each install of a game. Also, they planned to apply it retroactively to any best-selling games ever made with Unity. They also removed one of the license tiers at the same time, so instead of $400 your next option was a $2,000 license tier.
As for why people still use Unity: a lot of developers learned on Unity, and learning a new engine is daunting. A lot of devs also had ongoing projects in Unity, and transferring those to another engine isn't easy or even possible in some cases.
Pretty much. I've seen maybe 2 Godot ads in a year and a half of searching. If you want to work professionally, you need to know Unity of Unreal (or have strong fundamentals in C++ and get picked...
I guess the same goes for windows and gnu/Linux or ms office and libreoffice. Its what's teached in schools so its what stays used mainly on the job market
Pretty much. I've seen maybe 2 Godot ads in a year and a half of searching. If you want to work professionally, you need to know Unity of Unreal (or have strong fundamentals in C++ and get picked up by a big company with a custom engine).
Contrary to comments here I don't think Unity is on its deathbed. It still completely dominates the mobile scene and only very recently is Unreal starting to touch that. Godot adoption is rising but it's still years away from really being in the same conversation as Unity in professional studios.
Godot performance can struggle for heavier 2D games (i.e. simulation-heavy stuff like building management) and the 3D performance doesn't seem to be a high priority right now. So unless you're someone willing to tinker inside the engine, Unity is simply readier for any slightly ambitious indie project. Its C# integrations are still in flux for the community, and AFAIK for 4.3 sill isn't quite ready to publish builds to consoles (it's certainly possible, but not trivial. The official docs points to paying 3rd party developers to publish for you).
It may get there one day, but for various reasons (especially current dev audiences) it seems to be focusing on convinience over being ready to ship a game that can really put it on the map).
To be fair, this isn't really a feature/capability issue so much as a licensing thing. To quote Godot's own doc on the topic: That aside, Unity is definitely the more accessible and versatile...
and AFAIK for 4.3 sill isn't quite ready to publish builds to consoles (it's certainly possible, but not trivial. The official docs points to paying 3rd party developers to publish for you).
To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot has no legal structure to provide console ports.
Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.
That aside, Unity is definitely the more accessible and versatile engine, and I also don't think it's on its deathbed. However, people are definitely looking into alternatives after this whole debacle. Godot has seen explosive growth in the last year, and a lot of new developers are being encouraged to check out other engines. For all the ambitious titles made with Unity, there are also plenty of smaller titles that could be made with Godot and other engines as well.
How does the console and open source issue work for Unreal Engine? If I remember right, it is open source (or at least source available, which is the same issue here). Do they just have closed...
How does the console and open source issue work for Unreal Engine? If I remember right, it is open source (or at least source available, which is the same issue here). Do they just have closed source plugins that handle the console specific code?
Too little, too late? Even if they backtracked 100% from day 1, the fact that they even thought this was going to be a tolerable idea shows that they're so horrifically out of touch from their customer base.
Much like me and Microsoft, the trust is likely completely broken for a generation of game developers. I'll expect Unity to be a fraction of its former self inside of a decade.
Even though the personal edition exists, when this announcement came, I switched to godot and didn't look back.
I disagree, but as a game dev, I have a lot of mixed feelings.
I still think that as a company, unity is not putting the devs first. But this whole situation has forced them to realize that they don't have as strong of a hold on the market as they thought.
Many high-visibility indie devs have jumped to Godot and aren't looking back. I still enjoy Unity's tools et but I'm being very cautious. In the past, I would have flatly assumed every new project would be Unity. Now, I've officially changed that so that each project will be a new assessment of every tool available.
With new leadership, and with such a sudden reversal of their sudden fee announcement, I have seen some shift back to their indie developers' best interests. If that continues in that direction, I will continue to lean towards Unity, since I know it so well.
That said, I'm always watching Godot's updates closely and will continue to learn it so that it will be easier to switch if a new project comes up that would be serviced well by it.
My advice to all other game devs is the same I gave when this whole situation first came up: use the right tool for each job and don't become trapped into one ecosystem. Your flexibility in engine choice will only help you as a dev.
After this, I really don't care how much Unity changes. They'd have to become FOSS for me to consider them.
Unity had market share and a powerful host of features, at the cost of bugs and an inevitable enshittification down the road. But now Godot has largely caught up in featureset, and said enshittification has caused Unity to squander its own market share, so why bother with it now?
Godot can do so much nowadays, all with more stability, and you can trust it not to stab you in the back later. I can't say the same for any for-profit company, least of all Unity. They've fallen off the trust thermocline, as far as I'm concerned. It would take a miracle for them to come back from this.
I wouldn't be that complacent. All FOSS promises is that you can take your ball and go home if/when that stabbing comes. It still depends on you being able to play ball if that happens, though. Unless you're willing to lie on the hopes some competent teams manages a fork (and the cycle repeats).
You can look at several high profile projects to see that those schisms still do irrevokable damage to the development, if not outright kill it off entirely. Red hat and GIMP are some of the biggest examples. There was another open source engine a few years back that basically split in 3 once the repo owner more or less privatized the original engine, and the splinters are nowhere near as stable as before.
What happened with GIMP? I don't remember anything major, and a quick Google search just turns up a fork named "Glimpse" due to complaints about the name.
ahh the naming controversy. That was bizarre and Glimpse is a bit of an example of that. But the events that stagnated GIMP are much older, and more nuanced and technical. There was no huge, distinct schism to point to.
(I'll give a disclaimer here that much of this is very opinionated, and that you may find others perfectly happy with GIMP as it is today).
As you're probably aware, GIMP is decently known in the art world but was clearly made with programmers in mind. So that disconnect between its features and usability meant it never properly rose as a tool industry would utilize.
The name has been a recent lampshading of why industry won't adopt it (literal bikeshedding), but it comes more down to the core development team. There were many designers, graphics engineers, and even artists over the decades willing to help modernize GIMP. But the core team seems steadfast in their current philosophy and architecture, and vision. It reminds me a lot of Blender pre-2.8, but that lead to a brighter future.
That can still be excused, but the fact of the matter is that the core team itself implements their own features at a snail's pace. They've made promises for features over a decade ago that is still on some backlog roadmap to this day. It's not really a team interested in expanding, nor open to feedback. That's another way to kill a community before it really starts.
There was a "core rewrite" promised for decades at this point, but no real tangible progress towards this, not even in concept. That also makes it less attractive to fork; because instead of trying to work with experienced maintainers to understand the old tech and how to build on top, you're going to be wandering in the dark with a mix of documentation and confusion on what and how they modified it before you can do anything. At some point it's better to just start from scratch.
On the UI end, their reliance on GTK probably slows down progress both internally and for adoption purposes. The issues with GTK can be its own (very caustic) topic, but as a slightly unsatisfying TLDR; it's not as widely used and doesn't necessarily have the best setup for quickly making modern looking designs.
It's hard to point to sources since a lot of this history is told through IRC chat rooms, heated Gitlabs/mailing lists issues (which you can look up, but it'll be a rabbit hole), and oodles of other conversation lost to time. But This Hacker News thread may help give an overview of various issues the community has, as well as giving a dissenting voice from mine that are fine with the direction. Keep mind this is from 7 years ago, so you have hindsight to further (dis)prove the notions had here.
I’m not a game developer, but I suspect there are people who think about it a little differently and make more tactical, shorter term decisions: there is no runtime fee for now, so they can make games for now, and change to something else later if needed. After all, once a game is done, often game developers move on. The successes that last are rare.
When I was a Java developer, I didn’t worry too much about arguments that something could happen because it wasn’t open source. Eventually Sun did open source it, and a good thing, too, considering what happened with Oracle. Java lasted longer than my interest in it: I don’t write Java anymore when I can help it. That seems good enough?
Similarly, I’m comfortable using GitHub. I’m happy that alternatives are available if something happens and I hope they’re successful, but I don’t need to use them. Maybe Microsoft will mess it up someday, but so far it’s fine.
We don’t know the future and often things don’t last forever, but they might last plenty long enough.
If I was running a gamedev company, I certainly wouldn't re-do any current games in progress....but I'd almost certainly rethink building my next game on top of Unity. If I had delisted an older Unity game for the original change, I'd consider bringing it back online as well...but I almost certainly wouldn't consider throwing that much more weight behind it.
I've been tinkering with the idea of making a game myself, and right now Unity is pretty close to the bottom of the list for the reasons stated. And indie games are the lifeblood of Unity.
My employer abandoned LastPass wholesale after the breaches. There's no evidence there would ever be another breach, but we weren't going to bank our reputation on that. I personally see "Unity implements disasterous pricing plan then abandons it when it proves disasterous" more akin to a company getting breached. It's not a hypothetical "what if it gets bad," like Java, it's a "omg they made it bad" like Oracle did with their JDK licensing changes. There's a reason that huge numbers of people aren't using Oracle JDK builds anymore, even though Oracle backtracked a good bit. Every one of our company's vendors that provided a Java product used to use Oracle's JDK, and now they don't. Oracle burned what goodwill they had for that product (though anybody who has interacted with Oracle won't trust them for anything other than squeezing blood from a stone).
The only people this really affects are those stuck with a mostly done project already in Unity.
Anyone else choosing to go with Unity at this point is either unaware or doesn't care or thinks there's no better option (I don't think any of that is correct, but it is what it is).
For those stuck in purgatory, it might help them get their game out, but every smaller project i'm aware of has been stuck in a "well in theory we could port everything to another engine, in practice I'd rather just stop developing". This might give them an out of "we can now support the project until they do something else really fucking stupid".
Was this fee retroactive? Why couldn’t they release with the version of Unity they already had?
Fee was announced with the intentions of being retroactive and applying to already released games, which... I'm not sure is even legal. There was also minimal communication with the PR department, because I remember a big hullabaloo when someone on their social media team stated that they'd expect Microsoft to pay the runtime fee for games on GamePass. Which they quickly backtracked, because obviously they'd never run that by Microsoft.
I think they doubled down on the question of whether developers would be charged for pirated copies or redownloads, which... You can guess how disastrous that would be.
I really can't emphasize how disastrous that whole announcement was. They started with the worst business announcement I've seen from any company in my lifetime (seriously, absolutely no redeeming parts to it), and kept digging the hole deeper. I felt so bad for all developers with released Unity games because it felt like they were trapped. The fact they were willing to try to implement that retroactively raises the question of what else they would try, which makes any game ever made with Unity a potential liability.
Yes, the fee was retroactive.
I'm not really sure it's fair to lump Unity as "they". The prior CEO pushed for it, it didn't work, he got yeeted, and a new CEO hired by the board is reversing it.
This is also why CEOs are paid handsomely, when they're bad, they can cause a lot of damage.
So the old CEO lost all that pay.. right?
As in, are they no longer being paid? Sure.
As in, did Unity claw back what they paid him? Thankfully, this is impossible in US labor law.
So the CEO had no actual consequences for running the company into the ground. I'm sure we will see Riccitiello at another high paying position in the next ~12 months. To be fair a lot of the blame falls on the board, which is also largely immune to the consequences of failure.
It is very frustrating to see people failing upwards. Riccitiello also made a mess of EA.
What do you mean no consequences? He got fired. What else did you expect?
When you are paid that much money, being fired doesn't really seem like a consequence. For the employees of his companies getting fired could mean losing a home, dipping into their retirement, loss of healthcare, or their children not being able to attend college.
When a CEO gets fired it very much feels like they just get a ten month vacation before they move on to the next role that pays them a million a year.
Perhaps the compensation of a CEO should be tied to the long term success of a company, even after they are no longer present. Not quarterly success - long term success.
It is. CEO comp is tied to company success in two ways: one is that much of it comes in the form of stock compensation. Two is that it is usually incentive gated behind performance metrics. Remember the $46b pay package musk had? That was gated behind him 10x the market cap of the company over 5 years.
The former Unity CEO no doubt lost much in potential earnings by being yeeted when he was.
I mean, yeah. CEO's usually get hired already rich, and leave more or less rich but still plenty rich. They will never feel discomfort without gross mismangent of funds. But they can pay people money to make sure that doesn't happen.
I don't see what more you want to do to a CEO. The important part for Unity the company is that bad leadership is gone. There's not much point seeking vengence after that. They can sue the old CEO for damages, but incompetence is not a winning argument (again, for good reason. Can you imagine how that'd be exploited for senior employees who otherwise simply followed orders?)
That's what stocks do, and I'm pretty sure CEOs keep a lot of stock even when fired. So technically their consequences are felt.
Due to the above reasoning of "enter rich leave rich", this won't have your desired effect, though. They could have all their stocks expunged (and again, it's a good thing they can't do that) and they would still live with more money than many of us will ever see
I guess the issue is in the volume of compensation. If you get 20 million in stock and decrease the value of the company by 50%, you still have 10 million. You can, I believe, even use the decrease in price offset the taxes you'd owe. Capital gains tax rates also cap out at 20% if they hold it for over a year.
The impact outside of the executives is felt immediately and severely. The impact to the executives is barely felt at all. If your salary is $400,000 / year and you have $20,000,000 in stock it doesn't really matter how badly you fuck up. You are going to be doing great afterwards regardless of your performance.
Meanwhile the rank and file may have had to feel the impact of your poor decisions in life impacting ways.
That's already the case, as significant parts of CEO compensation can be in company stock with sale timing restrictions. It provides exactly that incentive.
Interesting writing prompt detected:
The CEO of a company hires the protagonist, a mercenary, to cover up the CEO's massive and illegal fuckup that, if discovered, would cost the company trillions. In this future, CEOs can have X% of their pay from the previous X-years with a company withdrawn, and turned into debt if it can't be repaid, so the CEO is particularly desperate to have the situation resolved.
Martha Wells? Are you reading this?
Huh, so free version limits is higher and professional fees are higher. Which fee got removed exactly?
On another note, I can't quite understand why people would go for unity with Godot being so powerful these days (and for free). I guess the same goes for windows and gnu/Linux or ms office and libreoffice. Its what's teached in schools so its what stays used mainly on the job market
The runtime fee basically meant they would charge developers for each install of a game. Also, they planned to apply it retroactively to any best-selling games ever made with Unity. They also removed one of the license tiers at the same time, so instead of $400 your next option was a $2,000 license tier.
For context, we discussed the runtime fee when it went down last year. You can find one of the multiple threads here, with an article and a summary of all the issues in the comments as we got more information. By the way, with each bit of new information it kept getting WORSE. There is a reason I'm so awed at the sheer awfulness of the whole announcement.
As for why people still use Unity: a lot of developers learned on Unity, and learning a new engine is daunting. A lot of devs also had ongoing projects in Unity, and transferring those to another engine isn't easy or even possible in some cases.
The "runtime" fee got removed; the one that would charge per game installation, and was written to be retroactive.
Oh, that sounds like an incredibly stupid fee, but well, nice to know they took it away
Pretty much. I've seen maybe 2 Godot ads in a year and a half of searching. If you want to work professionally, you need to know Unity of Unreal (or have strong fundamentals in C++ and get picked up by a big company with a custom engine).
Contrary to comments here I don't think Unity is on its deathbed. It still completely dominates the mobile scene and only very recently is Unreal starting to touch that. Godot adoption is rising but it's still years away from really being in the same conversation as Unity in professional studios.
Godot performance can struggle for heavier 2D games (i.e. simulation-heavy stuff like building management) and the 3D performance doesn't seem to be a high priority right now. So unless you're someone willing to tinker inside the engine, Unity is simply readier for any slightly ambitious indie project. Its C# integrations are still in flux for the community, and AFAIK for 4.3 sill isn't quite ready to publish builds to consoles (it's certainly possible, but not trivial. The official docs points to paying 3rd party developers to publish for you).
It may get there one day, but for various reasons (especially current dev audiences) it seems to be focusing on convinience over being ready to ship a game that can really put it on the map).
To be fair, this isn't really a feature/capability issue so much as a licensing thing. To quote Godot's own doc on the topic:
That aside, Unity is definitely the more accessible and versatile engine, and I also don't think it's on its deathbed. However, people are definitely looking into alternatives after this whole debacle. Godot has seen explosive growth in the last year, and a lot of new developers are being encouraged to check out other engines. For all the ambitious titles made with Unity, there are also plenty of smaller titles that could be made with Godot and other engines as well.
How does the console and open source issue work for Unreal Engine? If I remember right, it is open source (or at least source available, which is the same issue here). Do they just have closed source plugins that handle the console specific code?
Oh i am not trusting Unity ever again.