[HN Gopher] Unity is laying off hundreds of employees
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Unity is laying off hundreds of employees
Author : pjmlp
Score : 320 points
Date : 2022-06-30 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.protocol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.protocol.com)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| From my limited experience with the Unity engine, I would guess
| that it has been built with a colossal technical debt that is
| almost intractable.
|
| The foundations were technically weak and they started the
| reengineering process (DOTS) a bit late.
|
| I've seen that before, with PalmOS and other tech stacks that
| were hacked together and kind of worked for a while until the
| competition caught up.
|
| The zombie state can last a few years, but I am pretty sure there
| are cases where the whole thing can be saved with herculean
| effort.
| stoicjumbotron wrote:
| Alluding to this, at what point can such a huge company say
| that we have technical debt and that we'll be focusing on
| refactoring and making the base solid instead of releasing new
| features?
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| They are kind of doing that with DOTS and ProjectTiny, while
| still improving/maintaining the legacy base and adding
| features.
|
| https://unity.com/dots https://unity.com/solutions/instant-
| games
|
| But they have been working on this for 5 years now, and it is
| still "experimental", also the community response has been
| kind of lukewarm, many devs don't really understand why this
| is necessary.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I read that the dots team went dark over a year ago. People
| are speculating that the whole thing was either canceled,
| or they are planning to release a completely separate game
| engine rather than try and shoehorn it into the GameObject
| model.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| When a company finally gets there, we will let you know.
| johanneskanybal wrote:
| Did you also build one of the top two game builiding engines of
| the world or just ranting?
| atwood22 wrote:
| I see Unity lasting a long time. There are basically only two
| companies to consider if you want to make a 3D game: Unity and
| Unreal. Unity is so much easier to pick up for newer game
| developers, which means Unity will always have a funnel of new
| users that will help the company stay afloat. The decision to
| use C# is a major factor in Unity's success. Not only do you
| get the benefit of an existing ecosystem, and you also don't
| need to worry about the insanity that is C++. The biggest
| threat to Unity is probably Godot achieving a Blender-like
| success story where Godot achieves parity with Unity but is
| free.
| madrox wrote:
| The big risk to products where better UX is a differentiator
| is that it's easy for competitors to catch up and you need to
| keep moving. I tend to agree that Unity will be around for a
| while, but I'm not sure it will keep its same prominence.
| It's losing its first mover advantage.
| golergka wrote:
| Unreal has Blueprints that are superior to all Unity's visual
| scripting solutions, so if you're a beginning indie dev, you
| don't need to write code at all.
|
| If, however, you're a professional game developer who tries
| to get his game to run 60 FPS on a 6-year old phone (not a
| hypothetical example, I've led a project that had 60 FPS on
| iPhone 4 in 2016 with Unity), then you WANT the C++ and
| engine source code.
|
| I've been working with Unity since 2009 and hope to never
| touch that giant flaming pile of shit again in my life.
| Having moved to frontend development still, I'm very happy to
| work with tools that mostly work, and if they don't, you can
| actually dig in and debug them, with healthy development
| culture that actually encourages you to do so.
|
| Sorry for the emotional rant; 10 years of Unity experience
| (not really though, I've done other things in this time as
| well) do that to a person.
| ParksNet wrote:
| New game developers don't make any money. The gaming
| industry, both free and paid titles, is overwhelmingly hit-
| driven, and bigger professional teams can more consistently
| deliver high quality content.
|
| The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over the
| first year: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-
| first-week-...
|
| Considering cost of development and time, the average title
| most likely _loses_ money. People were basically LARPing as
| game developers, and throwing money at Unity for the
| privilege. As economic conditions deteriorate, its reasonable
| to expect people to stop doing that.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over
| the first year_
|
| That number is probably way overstating the median revenue.
| It is based on a non-random sample (hey devs, send us your
| data for a survey) of 75 games. Looking at a larger
| dataset, a majority of developers make <$1,000 (average
| revenue: $294).
|
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/what-can-we-learn-
| from-t...
| Cpoll wrote:
| The median is meaningless anyway, with the bar to entry
| being so low. If enough people publish games that no-one
| buy the median will be $0.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Yes, that's basically what's happening as more and more
| games are getting published.
|
| 2013: 551
|
| 2014: 1,631
|
| 2015: 2,679
|
| 2016: 4,466
|
| 2017: 6,251
|
| 2018: 8,137
|
| 2019: 7,841
|
| 2020: 9,609
|
| 2021: 10,696
| rozab wrote:
| Steam is kind of irrelevant. If you look through Unity job
| postings, almost all of them are in the mobile market
| (where Unity dominates) with the rest being gambling or
| web3 vaporware
| Hammershaft wrote:
| > People were basically LARPing as game developers, and
| throwing money at Unity for the privilege.
|
| If you make a game, and it struggles due to very tough
| market conditions, you are not LARPing as a game dev. You
| are a game developer. There are countless gems on steam
| that have not gotten commercial success, but are well
| engineered and well designed titles.
| nimblegorilla wrote:
| I agree Steam games are a difficult market to break into,
| but there are other ways to make money. Unity is also a
| nice platform if you want to produce interactive content
| for corporate or educational consulting projects.
|
| Also consider the large number of places such as Hobby
| Lobby, Williams-Sonoma, or Home Depot that cater to
| hobbyist/amateurs rather than industry professionals.
| LaGrange wrote:
| As far as I know, there is exactly zero reason to give
| Unity money if you're a hobbyist.
| atwood22 wrote:
| Unity's asset store is a pretty cheap and convenient way
| to get assets if you're on a budget.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> LARPing as game developers
|
| That's harsh in my opinion. In entertainment and media
| there are always more people who want to do a thing than
| can be supported: musicians, actors, comedians, artists,
| etc.
|
| Sometimes amateurs become pros. Sometimes people "LARPing"
| -- as you call it --make games I really enjoy. So I think
| its cool that people try their luck at game development
| even knowing most won't make a living at it.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Ya. Am I LARPing as a developer for creating OSS things
| that scratch and itch and not working at Oracle or some
| such.
| whateveracct wrote:
| What is the median lifetime sales? Or over a 5 year window?
| I don't think first year is the end-all, be-all here given
| how being a gamedev actually works (e.g. what if I release
| 5 games in 5 years?) But it's possible first year sales are
| effectively lifetime sales on average as well.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| There is a long, slowly accumulating tail but to get
| there you need to survive five years and five releases.
| And least some of those need to be more successful than
| the median to generate real revenue in the tail. It also
| comes with increased expense in terms of maintaining
| those games, both the codebase itself and the marketing
| around it. For all that you'll probably pull in a
| mediocre salary for a single developer.
| Uehreka wrote:
| If your company (or personal LLC) is only making $3000/year
| in revenue, you can use Unity for free (the threshold where
| you need Unity Pro is $100K/year). So even if fewer people
| are doing those kinds of "nights and weekends passion
| project" games, it's not likely that it's affecting Unity's
| overall revenue that much.
| giobox wrote:
| Right, but some of these passion projects in turn become
| breakout hits that breach the 100k barrier then
| presumably generate revenue for Unity - think of indie
| games that break out into mainstream built on Unity like
| _Among Us_ or _Valheim_. If the reduction in passion
| project games is significant enough it might well have an
| impact - especially as fewer "AAA" style development
| houses pick Unity.
| wilg wrote:
| God I would love for Unity to offer a Swift (no GC, fully
| type safe, compiled, fast) API with a rethought API surface.
| And have only one renderer to choose from instead of 3 with
| all different features.
| oaiey wrote:
| C# on Unity is very different then what you expect.
| Different base class library, stack instead of heap
| objects, heap arranged to allow fast iterating over them.
| It is C# but it is not your typical .NET. And .NET done
| right is in the performance region where other aspects kick
| in (like network or UI bottlenecks).
| wilg wrote:
| My only .NET experience is Unity and it's not great.
| andrewf wrote:
| _And have only one renderer to choose from instead of 3
| with all different features._
|
| So you want a fourth renderer? :)
| atwood22 wrote:
| Honestly, ARC in a game engine sounds miserable. Circular
| references are a common occurrence in game development.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| There's a ton of mandatory reference counting in almost
| every contemporary graphics driver. I also hate reference
| counting overhead, but it really isn't as big of a deal
| as you're making it out to be unless you use it for stuff
| like references in render passes.
| wilg wrote:
| I mean the #1 issue with Unity performance is GC pauses
| which are very easy to create. Swift of course has tools
| for dealing with circular references. I'd certainly take
| the trade.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| I'm not sure how much of a performance hit ARC traffic
| would be. Though I think at least some of Unity's DOTS
| systems really on structs instead of reference counted
| objects so it shouldn't be a problem there.
| wilg wrote:
| Swift structs should work for that too. But also DOTS is
| like years away from being ready it seems like. Basically
| hacked into the engine and language and kinda over
| complicated and confusing at the moment.
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Not ARC per se but the message dispatch mechanism was the
| biggest hurdle to high performance Objective C. The
| solution was easy : drop to C. Not really the best
| options for ease of approach :)
| acchow wrote:
| > There are basically only two companies to consider
|
| today.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > if you want to make a 3D game: Unity and Unreal
|
| Speaking of which, whatever happened with iDTech?
| [deleted]
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Bethesda/Microsoft bought them and took it off the
| licensing market, but it also seems questionable to me if
| it had a future there anyway, because they seemed to have
| gone all-in on large but totally static environments with
| Rage, something which has not changed with Doom. That's not
| something that really works for many games.
|
| Looking at the family chart you can see that the last
| version that was widely licensed was idTech 3 - from 1999:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-
| _...
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Unreal seems to have made great strides to make their engine
| more approachable by outsiders. Five years ago you had a
| stronger argument, these days I'm not so sure.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| Although blueprints are great, once you have to touch C++
| it's not so great. Tools like Rider for Unreal make it
| much, much better though. C++ is king of game dev and
| everyone hates it. Unreal is not regular C++ and handles a
| lot of resource management for you, but it's still C++.
| chunkyguy wrote:
| Am I the only one who prefers C++ over C#?
| tuckerpo wrote:
| You're not alone.
| dilap wrote:
| you've used both and still feel that way? i admit, i'm
| surprised!
|
| why the love for c++?
| bena wrote:
| I want to say this, but it's honestly been close to a
| decade since I've seriously touched C or C++. I've used
| Objective-C more recently than C/C++.
|
| These days, if I'm thinking about creating an
| application, I'm defaulting to C#.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| No, c# is java done well and I can't stand java.
|
| C++ is a pretty decent language with a few weird
| features.
|
| I may be biased by programming in Qt + c++, the best UI
| development flow ever created
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I've used C++ for near 10 years and I don't hate it
| (that's a lie I hate it with a passion), but C# is just
| has much more flexibility, has better error messaging,
| easier to integrate 3rd party libraries, better package
| manager, better namespaces, no header hell, no memory
| leaks, exceptions with useful information, reflection,
| and so much more. C++ has raw speed.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| I've seen this from both the developer and consumer side of
| things. The legacy design of Unity encouraged truly terrible
| code designs which translate into sub-optimal performance on
| modern hardware.
|
| Performance and tooling have historically driven game engine
| licensing. There's a reason why Unity has a noticeable lack of
| presence in so-called triple-a gaming. Believe me, if
| performance was "pretty good" and tooling was "excellent" then
| every major studio would be using Unity. Instead, they're
| overwhelming using Unreal or they're using their franchise
| engine that they've built over 1 or 2 decades similar to id
| Software whose engines used to be the direct Unreal competitor.
|
| As a consumer, I cringe when I run game that is "powered by
| Unity". They nearly always feature extremely slow loading and
| sub-optimal framerate on top tier hardware. In contrast, an id
| or Unreal engine game will run at 4k 60fps while looking
| beautiful.
|
| On another note, Unity's market has always seemed to be indie
| and double-a studios. I would expect a recession to cause many
| who would have "taken a year off to make a game" to change
| their minds as investments or savings drawdown.
| [deleted]
| spixy wrote:
| Fun story: once I decompiled some mobile game written in
| Python I think and they shown Unity logo on loading screen
| cheriot wrote:
| The "powered by Unity" is only required by less expensive
| Unity subscriptions so it's boarder line anti-branding.
| People think Unity sucks because only low budget games
| advertise that they're made with Unity.
| terafo wrote:
| It is not limited to games that use free versions of the
| engine. I can't think of a unity game aside from the couple
| of mostly 2d games like Ori and Cuphead that weren't
| crappy.
| cheriot wrote:
| Crappy is a matter of taste, but there's Unity games with
| fans: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/shx6ku/en
| gines_use...
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| A lot of studios are starting to pick up Unity. It's not that
| Unity can't make AAA games, it's that most of the workforce
| is used to C++ and Unreal style engines. Most A and AA games
| are being made with Unity nowadays. Unity started getting
| popular in mobile dev where it's still king and now those
| devs are slowly moving on to bigger better games.
| golergka wrote:
| > On another note, Unity's market has always seemed to be
| indie and double-a studios.
|
| That's part of Unity's market, but it's bread and butter are
| mobile free-to-play games.
| noahmasur wrote:
| They may not qualify as AAA, but Hearthstone, League of
| Legends: Wild Rift, Kerbal Space Program, Cuphead, Gwent,
| Genshin Impact, ReCore, Ori 1 and 2, Hollow Knight, Fall
| Guys, Pillars of Eternity, Call of Duty Mobile, Subnautica,
| Firewatch, and Valheim are pretty big games; some indie hits
| but many are produced by major studios.
|
| For one thing, I think the "powered by Unity" branding is a
| problem, because you only see it on games that couldn't
| afford to actually pay for Unity and therefore have a larger
| chance of being poorly polished.
| richwater wrote:
| Half of these games run like absolute trash though.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| They have made fun about being relieved that XNA had only been
| a framework rather than an engine. MonoGame
| http://www.monogame.net might actually outlive Unity in the
| end. In any case, the Unity founders will be millionaires.
| cinntaile wrote:
| But Unity isn't just used for games.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| Sure, there are Excel games too.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I don't get your point.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Unity is for games. Without the games market, a company
| like Unity can't exist. Unreal Engine is used for dataviz
| and media production projects, but it's business is
| games.
|
| His point is that if Excel lost the business world, the
| fact that people do things like write games in Excel will
| not save it, and he is asking you to understand that the
| assertion that Unity is used for more than games is
| roughly analogous, which it is.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Most of their revenue comes from other activities,
| another commenter mentioned this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932162
|
| My point was that it is comparing an engine to an engine
| + more. I do agree that the engine is central, but it is
| much broader than games.
| foobiekr wrote:
| That isn't what that commenter is saying. What he's
| saying is that engine licensing isn't the bulk of their
| revenue, other non-game-revenue-dependent services are.
| Those services are _game_ services that happen to not be
| tied, like the license of the engine itself, to the
| published game revenue.
| cinntaile wrote:
| That commenter does say that most of their revenue
| doesn't come from the engine, because that's what the
| numbers tell you. It's also what I just said, I just
| summarized it to engine + more.
|
| Please don't claim it's similar to making games using
| Excel, it really isn't. But it explains why I didn't
| understand what he meant, so that's something at least.
| foobiekr wrote:
| You said "unity isn't just for games."
|
| What I am trying to tell you is that the revenue
| breakdown you are using to justify this statement doesn't
| actually say that. What it says is that due to unity's
| pricing model, the bulk of the revenue they are making
| isn't all engine license revenue (which is both game and
| non-game), it is other services, almost all of which such
| as voice chat and asset store are strictly game-related.
|
| In other words, Unity may be more than games, but they
| are entirely game dependent. It doesn't say that revenue
| is non-game.
| vopi wrote:
| I assume the poster is implying that although Unity is
| used in things outside of gaming, the vast majority of
| users and development are/is in gaming.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Monogame is missing a lot of features if you're wanting
| anything but the basics in 3D (it's still very good for 2D
| games). I tried hard to use it instead of Unity (for over a
| year), and only recently switched to Unity because I wanted
| to add VR support, and forgot just how much easier doing 3D
| in Unity is compared to Monogame.
|
| Like I was fighting Monogame on model rendering, textures,
| shaders, cross-platform (never could get a high-res 3D
| working for the Mac version), anti-aliasing, etc. Everything
| 3D was being a pain in the ass to get working, and my
| progress was very slow.
|
| After one day of porting my assets over to Unity, doing some
| tweaks in the editor, and importing a few assets from the
| Unity store, and my game already looked better than it ever
| looked in Monogame (still working on porting the rest of the
| game).
|
| It should be said that I'm not an expert 3D developer, I'm
| much stronger in 2D, but have been trying to do more in 3D
| lately, and that may be part of why I struggled with Monogame
| in 3D. People who have no issues coding in OpenGL or DirectX
| directly probably won't have as many issues as I did.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Ultimately software becomes medicine, not human or veterinary
| medicine, but computer medicine. You have all this code, but
| you can't read it all and can't check if it's right. Then you
| end up with tumors in the code (Blas Mena came up with this
| concept) and they can be benign or malignant, and ought to be
| contained. Tumors can be 500 lines of C#, ballpark, in a 15000
| LOC codebase.
|
| Yes LOC, lines of code, is a bad metric--compared by Bill Gates
| to weight on an airplane--but at the end it is still meaningful
| to the complexity--mass of an airplane.
|
| So the whole game in software companies is at some point taking
| Human Growth Hormone and growing fast, and inevitably getting
| some tumors, but hoping they are benign and contained. Or they
| can spread and the software dies.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Counterpoint: Windows works with 30 year old code, and somehow
| managed to manage their piles of tech debt and still work.
| Still a huge % of the market.
| ww520 wrote:
| If you're talking about the Windows OS itself, the OS kernel
| is very good and has pretty solid foundation. Windows NT was
| based on VMS which was an excellent cutting-edge OS of the
| time.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's a bit of a stretch to say it was "based on VMS."
|
| Yes the core initial engineers and leadership that started
| it were ex-DEC engineers.
|
| But if you listen to Dave Cutler's interviews and read
| about it you can see clearly that some concepts were
| borrowed but much of the thinking was from scratch. He took
| the chance of starting a greenfield project to make
| something far more current.
|
| In particular NT was designed from the ground up to be
| multiprocessor and multithreading friendly, which is not
| the case for VMS.
|
| Secondly NT was designed to host multiple OS
| "personalities", VMS not at all.
|
| Finally NT was designed to be portable between ISAs and
| they spent years making sure it worked equally well on
| MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, x86, and then amd64.
|
| NT the kernel is awesome. I just wish they'd shipped a
| better userspace from day one.
|
| Imagine if Microsoft had shipped NT with a proper Unix-like
| shell environment in the 90s and not the crap "command.com"
| and WinCRT.dll garbage. What a better world we'd live in.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Because microsoft dominated a market segment with mostly no
| competition for long enough to make people dependent in a way
| that users couldn't simply choose an alternative. There are
| idiosyncrasies in windows usage that users think are normal,
| but are actually legacy behavior which can't be changed
| because it could break other peoples tools. This makes
| windows users not only locked on the platform but also expect
| those misbehavior if they try to change. Also consider that
| depending on the hardware, software or services you use,
| there is NO alternative to windows.
|
| I don't think the same is true for Unity.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Also, yes, the user experience is not that bad, especially
| these days.
|
| I love using Linux and Unix in general, but the legacy
| idiosyncrasies there are kind of worse.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm kinda sad that we have really ended up with
| essentially two operating systems or families of such
| dominating. Unix/Linux/BSD and Windows... Both with their
| own issues and historic loads...
|
| I feel that we could do so much better in modern age if
| some of the things were just let go, but trenches has
| been dug and nothing will likely happen.
| philistine wrote:
| Uhhh ... macOS is exactly what you're talking about. It's
| unafraid to let some things just go. They just said
| during the State of the Union this week that Obj-C and
| UIKit were legacy tools, and that the future is Swift and
| SwiftUI. They said it, and I promise you they will
| deliver on this. I predict that within a decade Apple
| will truly deprecate UIKit and AppKit and stop any new
| app from using it. Microsoft has never been able to do
| that.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Isn't it still a Unix derivative? Still have bash or
| something as cli?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Macos still uses the darwin kernel which is a bsd. Still
| ships 'terminal', default shell these days is zsh.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| They will try, but a decade is far too brief for that to
| happen. Swift was introduced eight years ago and there
| are still plenty of apps, especially ones belong to large
| corporations, that contain Objective-C legacy code.
| Including Apple's own apps. Maybe once SwiftUI gets its
| Swift 5 moment when there's a release that's stable
| enough going forward.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Ouch, I was not aware of that.
|
| Deprecating Obj-C will probably also deprecate support
| for C/C++ support.
|
| I never used Proprietary Apple tech stack, when I made
| games for iOS it was C/C++/OpenGL and these days Vulkan
| with MoltenVK
|
| If they deprecate native code, they are going to lose a
| lot of devs.
|
| Never going to touch Swift with a ten feet pole.
| galad87 wrote:
| Nothing is deprecated, they just recommend Swift and
| SwiftUI for new apps. And while they could deprecate
| UIKit in ten years or more, C and C++ won't be deprecated
| any time soon, they just starting working on Swift and
| C++ bridge too.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Windows NT learned from DOS, Win 3.1, and Windows 95 though.
| They had 4 generations or so before they made an operating
| system that was stable and maintainable.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Windows NT was in development before 95 and Windows 3.1
| became successful _while_ NT was actively under
| development.
|
| It did not so much learn from Windows 3.1, TBH, but did
| learn from OS/2. And from VMS and RSX-11, which Dave Cutler
| worked on in the past.
|
| The windowing system in the initial NT release did look
| like Windows 3.1 though.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Windows NT is the brainchild of Dave Cutler. Cutler was one
| of the tech leads on VMS. He was only hired away from
| Digital when they shitcanned his "Project Rainbow" follow
| up to VMS.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > still work
|
| Yeah, by only ever adding new layers of crust and never
| actually changing the Old Code, at least if the GUI is
| anything to go by.
| mattarm wrote:
| > Windows works with 30 year old code, and somehow managed
| [...]
|
| I don't think Microsoft has any particularly secret sauce
| here, they just have a good reason to keep it going and the
| money to do so. Many other cases the money just isn't there.
|
| And don't under estimate the herculean efforts Microsoft goes
| through, or eat least used to go through, to keep old
| programs running. It goes far beyond what I would have ever
| imagined had I not talked to some of the people involved with
| it. We're talking having the OS detect specific versions of
| specific programs (e.g. old versions of Quicken) and hot
| patching specific APIs with bug-compatible behavior so they
| don't break with an OS upgrade. Microsoft definitely takes
| backward compatibility seriously.
| kerng wrote:
| That would be true if Microsoft would have stayed with DOS as
| foundation.
|
| But they knew the shaky foundation and built NT which is a
| very good and that decision is probably the main reason
| Windows is still around.
| wvenable wrote:
| They were also smart enough to parallel development with
| Windows 95/98 -- creating two mostly compatible operating
| systems for different segments until the need for backwards
| compatibility and the power of the hardware made it
| possible to obsolete the DOS line.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Have you ever looked at the source code of the NT kernel?
| (there have been a few leaks over the years)
|
| Windows is indeed full of old and new crust, but the
| foundations are actually not bad, NT is a pretty good kernel
| if you ask me.
|
| The quality of Microsoft engineering is often underestimated,
| mostly because it is all over the place, different teams, a
| huge amount of technical debt, but in my opinion some key
| pillars have been built well enough and maintained, and they
| also managed to deal with the crust and survive without
| falling into the classic trap of the second system syndrome.
| unsui wrote:
| Related HN link on Dave Cutler and his work on creating NT.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977868
|
| Just ordered a copy of the book "Showstopper"
| swivelmaster wrote:
| It's a great book!
| Dangeranger wrote:
| These sorts of sterile PR responses ...
|
| > "As part of a continued planning process where we regularly
| assess our resourcing levels against our company priorities, we
| decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus
| and support our long-term growth. This resulted in some hard
| decisions that impacted approximately 4% of all Unity workforce.
| We are grateful for the contributions of those leaving Unity and
| we are supporting them through this difficult transition."
|
| ... are dehumanizing, and serve only as a legal smoke screen.
|
| I really wish that layoff announcements acknowledged the pain of
| those people let go, and the pain of those people who will remain
| who have to take up the slack under a tighter fiscal belt.
|
| This best expressed by George Carlin's quote on "soft
| language"[0], which stated; "Americans have trouble facing the
| truth, So they invent a kind of a soft language to protect
| themselves from it"
|
| Pretending it doesn't hurt doesn't help. Let go of the
| euphemisms.
|
| [0] https://www.thoughtco.com/soft-language-euphemism-1692111
| mym1990 wrote:
| You would have lawsuits on your desk before the first layoffs
| even left the building. I remember a lawyer or someone told me
| 'if you ever get into an accident, don't even say sorry'. There
| are people who will truly be hurt, and an apology would do a
| great deal of good for them, but there are also people who will
| seek any opportunity to pull you through the mud as soon as you
| give them an admission of guilt.
|
| Again, whether it is right or wrong is a different discussion
| from the fact that it is the current state of legal things, and
| incentives are high for all kinds of foul play.
| awillen wrote:
| Is less euphemistic language somehow better? If they said, "The
| economy is in bad shape, so we've decided we need to be
| spending less money right now. One way we're going to do that
| is by laying people off. We're sorry, but we're a corporation
| and we have to make prudent business decisions even if they
| cause some people to suffer." would that make anybody who got
| laid off feel better?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Probably, and probably not enough to matter.
|
| What would really help is that the previous statement were in
| the form of "by policy, we _never_ discuss the possibility of
| a layoff " instead of having a policy of lying while you
| prepare it.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| Better? probably. Being honest with people is usually better.
|
| But this is a good time to remind everyone that you owe zero
| -- ZERO -- loyalty to a company. Be just as ruthless to them
| as they are to you.
|
| As an employee know that the company that employs you does
| not have your best interest in mind. They will dump you as
| soon as the asymmetry between what you provide to them vs.
| what they provide to you is no longer in their favor. I mean,
| it has to be that way, but you need to keep your eyes open to
| it.
|
| This is a very cynical view, but ultimately, the company
| couldn't care less about you. You are disposable, and will be
| disposed-of at the first opportunity it's called for.
|
| Remember that asymmetry can go the other way too. The very
| moment they are no longer providing high-value to you as an
| employer you can (and should) start searching for something
| better, where the asymmetry is more in your favor. You can
| ditch them just as quickly and easily as they ditch you.
| rot13xor wrote:
| It's a good view to have. HR stands for human resources.
| The company views you the same way as a EC2 instance. They
| make layoff decisions the same way they spin down servers
| if their AWS bill gets too high.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It's not cynical, it's business. The dishonesty _always_
| flows from corporation to employee.
| laserlight wrote:
| I'm surprised by how and why people believe company
| statements claiming that there won't be layoffs. Nothing
| can be a matter of belief in business. The company can
| either commit to a penalty in case there are layoffs or the
| statement effectively doesn't exist.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Plain language like that would be fantastically refreshing
| yes.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Human beings understand this, which is why any manager with
| half a heart will translate to the plain language version
| instinctively after they're done reading the HR-prescribed
| spiel.
|
| HR is a profession whose purpose is to turn the process of
| hiring and employing human labor into a pantomime of
| financing and procuring capital goods or raw materials.
| Since their business is treating people like anything but
| people ("resources", contracts, "headcount", "cycles",
| etc.), this often slips their mind.
| athenot wrote:
| It's possible. I've been in a Fortune 100 company that did
| this. They explained the timeline too, with a deadline to
| accept a voluntary leave package, then a later date where
| those staying could be affected by layoffs.
|
| Being a large company, they were able to plan it in such a
| way as to encourage those close to retirement to leave, those
| who wanted to jump to go ahead and leave, and minimize the
| brain drain. They weren't running on a razor thin runway
| where ever day was bleading cash.
|
| Because one of the downsides of surprize layoff
| announcements, is that while many execs think they are just
| removing the lowest performing tier, what actually happens is
| the top performers who do have options see the writing on the
| wall and go ahead and jump elsewhere. Cost-cutting achieved
| but teams lobotomized and further decline ensues.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's a high level domain specific language, just precise enough
| to explain what's happening and why it's happening on high
| level. A bit like the way doctors speak to each other in formal
| settings, if you wish.
|
| The good wishes and sincere dialogs are better held on personal
| level, i.e. the managers can have it with their subordinates in
| private.
| ALotOfBees wrote:
| Acknowledging pain caused by the company's actions could be
| seen as admitting to directly causing psychological distress.
| IANAL but I'm sure these company's legal departments want to
| white-wash the messaging as much as possible.
| yrgulation wrote:
| The unity asset store is a total mess. Unity itself crashes
| often. And for anything more than a basic game you have to fight
| the engine. Somehow i saw this coming.
| meesterdude wrote:
| To be fair, I'm on the Beta builds and while sometimes there
| are crashes, it's often fixed in the next beta release. And
| maybe i am just building something basic, but I've never had to
| fight the engine. And the asset store has provided me a lot of
| great resources.
| topitguy wrote:
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| They should have added support for C++ scripting a long time ago,
| while maintaining equal support for C#. Many if not most of their
| troubles stem from their failure to do this. It's ok to be the
| poor man's Unreal if you provide a platform for your users to
| gain experience with the language used at the top end of the
| industry. Putting them in a .NET second class citizen ghetto
| instead might help lock users in in the short term, but erodes
| your appeal over time as people see that focusing on Unity limits
| you to working in the low and mid tiers of the industry
| bluescrn wrote:
| How many Unity projects are really bottlenecked by C# scripting
| performance in ways that couldn't be solved by sticking to
| well-known best practices, or using the Job System, or in some
| cases maybe compute shaders?
|
| IMHO, the last thing that Unity needs right now is a new
| scripting language option and more fragmentation.
|
| What they really need is _fewer_ options. Right now there 's 3
| render pipelines, 3 UI systems, 3 physics engines, 2 input
| systems, and so on - competing for resources/attention. They've
| tried to replace so many systems but never quite made it to the
| point where they can actually remove the 'legacy' versions of
| the system, for various reasons.
| tedivm wrote:
| >Unity CEO John Riccitiello told employees two weeks ago that it
| was on solid financial footing and would not be resorting to
| layoffs.
|
| I know CEOs have to tow the party line to a certain extent, but
| I've always wondered if they just don't care about their own
| reputation. If I was an employee of his I'd have to assume he's
| either incompetent or dishonest.
| axg11 wrote:
| Every layoff I've witnessed first or second-hand was preceded
| by the same promise within <2 months from the layoff. I've come
| to the conclusion it's a necessary evil. These questions are
| only asked of leaders at companies on a shaky footing. As a
| CEO, your only option is to deny there will be layoffs. Any
| other statement will cause panic.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Most of the time, official denials like this are official
| confirmations. You just have to parse the actual statement.
|
| Recently, the CEO of a giant and old tech company, got into a
| meeting with all of his manager and above employees and very,
| very carefully said "no layoff is planned." Of course not:
| planned means they have finished.
| endemic wrote:
| Exactly. At the point where the question is being asked,
| you already know the answer.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > As a CEO, your only option is to deny there will be
| layoffs. Any other statement will cause panic.
|
| Really? Where unions are strong layoffs can be negotiated for
| months. There is no panic.
| luma wrote:
| > I've come to the conclusion it's a necessary evil.
|
| You can drop the word "necessary" from that statement. We're
| just saying that CEOs, by the nature of their job, are not to
| be trusted with anything that might come between the
| shareholders and the money they think they are due.
|
| Let's not say that the poor CEOs are in an untenable
| position, rather, the sort of person who is comfortable with
| choosing an investor's bank account over an employee's family
| is also the sort of person who is likely to be chosen to be
| CEO.
| xeromal wrote:
| This analogy is a bit of a stretch I know, but I think
| they're compatible. A leader's job in war and in a company
| is to ensure the morale of their soldiers. You may be in a
| losing situation, but if you're honest, you're guaranteed
| to lose. If people think there's still a fighting chance,
| the company may yet succeed.
|
| Of course, there are better ways than outright saying no,
| but complete honesty is not the solution always.
| tyrfing wrote:
| > choosing an investor's bank account over an employee's
| family
|
| Unity, along with most of the tech industry, loses
| incredible amounts of money, and salaries are typically
| their biggest expense. Those losses (salaries) are paid out
| of investor bank accounts, which the company cannot
| control. Thus those employees are highly exposed to
| liquidity pullbacks like now, since employing them was
| never profitable.
|
| Unity plans to cut 100 million in expenses this year, and
| hopes to stop losing money next year.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _the sort of person who is comfortable with choosing an
| investor 's bank account over an employee's family is also
| the sort of person who is likely to be chosen to be CEO._
|
| A hard part about being a leader is doing what's best for
| the highest number of people. If you're short on runway and
| the investors tell you that you either lay people off or
| you're not getting funded, it's not about choosing
| investors over employees, it's about saving as many
| employees as you can.
|
| In the current climate this is exactly what investors are
| saying.
|
| Ben Horowitz has some good stories about this in _The Hard
| Thing About Hard Things_
| MattGaiser wrote:
| A lot of it is wordplay. They want to give the impression that
| they didn't need to do the layoff, as they do have money, but
| it was the prudent thing to do.
| gernb wrote:
| I don't know Riccitiello but honeslty I've done this myself
| (not a CEO). Bascially I beleive I (we) can do something and
| stated so and within 2 weeks my info / situation changed and I
| we can no longer do that something.
|
| To put it another way, the CEO or founder is often the most
| optimistic person. Imagine a single founder, they want to
| believe they'll pull through, get that funding, find the
| customers, whatever it is that keeps things going up. People
| will claim a CEO has to be different but I personally think
| it's human nature for most people to hope/wish/desire/see the
| best outcome.
|
| Unless there is some smoking gun email that says "I'm going to
| tell them we'll be fine but actually I'm going to layoff a
| bunch in 2 weeks", my gut says the CEO beleived what he said
| when he said it.
| tedivm wrote:
| This is basically just saying that CEOs are allowed to lie
| because they're also lying to themselves at the same time,
| but honestly I think that goes back to the incompetence
| thing.
|
| Two weeks between "no layoffs, we're doing great!" to "yup,
| we're laying people off" means that the CEO had to be
| optimistic to the point of delusion (or incompetent, as I
| said).
| jjav wrote:
| > This is basically just saying that CEOs are allowed to
| lie because they're also lying to themselves at the same
| time, but honestly I think that goes back to the
| incompetence thing.
|
| To be fair, there are times when they layoffs are imminent
| but the CEO keeps optimism up and sometimes the
| customer/funding does show up and the money doesn't run
| out. You typically don't hear about these ones (or only
| years later).
| symlinkk wrote:
| He's extremely competent at lying to make the company look good
| Cypher wrote:
| They would've started the rumour themselves about layoffs
| before dismissing it, then they quietly let them go one by one.
|
| There's an old play book floating somewhere, I think it was
| aimed at union workers. The reason is plant the seed and soften
| the shock.
| [deleted]
| draw_down wrote:
| LegitShady wrote:
| Toe not tow.
| aetherson wrote:
| There was a line that you put your toe on when the crew lined
| up on old ships!
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Participants in races toe the starting line to this day.
| "Conform" essentially covers all literal and metaphorical
| usage.
|
| I'm not sure how the CEO is conforming to a "party" in this
| particular case though.
| afterburner wrote:
| CEOs act as marketing at the highest level. I have always
| assumed they would lie about something like this. In fact it's
| even more common with lower levels of management (because they
| can't make the call on their own).
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Several years ago I was working at one of the largest tech
| companies in the world, and there were rumors of layoffs in our
| org. We had a huge all hands meeting (over 1000 people in the
| room), and at the end the VP asked if there were any questions.
| I straight up asked him if that was happening. Every eye in the
| room glared at me in surprise. He assured me that was just a
| rumor and we had nothing to worry about, and "as far as he
| knew" there were no cuts upcoming. THE NEXT DAY they laid off
| 100 people. I was not laid off, but I started looking for other
| work because he lied to my face. About 2 months later I was
| turning in my badge and was very blunt on my exit questionnaire
| about the reason.
| apetresc wrote:
| If it's "one of the largest tech companies in the world", I
| legitimately don't think 100 people counts as a "layoff",
| does it? This company must have tens of thousands of
| employees if it's "one of the largest in the world" and has
| over 1000 people in a single room during an all-hands.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| It is generally assumed that companies pull this shit. If I
| get fired the government pays me my salary for a year while
| I'm looking for another job.
|
| I don't really blame corporations, the moment that they admit
| weakness is when the hyenas show up.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > If I get fired the government pays me my salary for a
| year while I'm looking for another job.
|
| Theoretically. My experience was that getting unemployment
| benefits as a skilled worker is practically impossible. You
| have to interview constantly, and there are lots of
| companies interviewing recently laid off tech workers, and
| they offer crap salaries knowing that only so many offers
| can be turned down before your claims are rejected.
| dont__panic wrote:
| I'm no apologist for overpaid middle management, but... I'm
| not sure what the best response would actually be to this
| kind of question. If you answer "yes," but the final layoffs
| aren't finalized... you initiate widespread panic, because
| everyone worries that they could get laid off. If you answer
| "no," you're a dishonest snake. If you know exactly which
| departments are facing layoffs, you could answer "yes" and
| just jump the gun to announce they layoffs right at that
| moment, but... you'll still end up stressing a lot of people
| out and hurting general productivity.
|
| Not trying to make up excuses for the lying here, but I'm
| genuinely curious what a VP _should_ do in this position. Lie
| for the good of the many? Or be truthful to keep a clean
| conscience?
| acomjean wrote:
| We had open new all hands meeting and allowed questions for
| management at my stint at big defense company. People asked
| pointed questions (why aren't our raises keeping up with
| inflation? was one I remember. The company doesn't owe us
| raises was the agitated response). Management looked
| terrible.
|
| After a couple of those meeting, questions where to but
| submitted by email in advance.... I left not long after.
| [deleted]
| wowokay wrote:
| When it happened at my previous company several years ago,
| the CIO was honest and upfront. We were on our 2nd down
| tick in retail and he said in the next few months they
| would be letting contractors go. A few months after that he
| told us they might be laying off or outsourcing certain
| departments. A few months after that he told us which areas
| would be effected and that individuals would know if they
| are being let go on one of 2 days back to back. Everyone
| knew if they made it through those days they were safe.
| Then they gave those employees let go 6 months to offload
| responsibilities, and helped them find new jobs.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| That's impressive. It is very hard to communicate this
| kind of news without getting tangled up in your own
| emotions.
| fatherzine wrote:
| Speak the truth. "I can't answer this kind of a question.
| If I answer 'yes', then there will be undue stress on the
| people that are not getting laid off. If I answer 'no', but
| the business requires layoffs, then I will be lying."
| Uehreka wrote:
| The problem is, it is to the advantage of every manager
| who is not laying people off to say "Absolutely not".
| Every employee is aware that managers have this
| incentive, so anything other than "Absolutely not" is
| likely to mean "Yes". There is no collective incentive
| for managers at different companies to all answer "I
| can't say" in order to give each other plausible
| deniability.
| fatherzine wrote:
| Correct. And sometimes the world will literally feed you
| to the lions for speaking truth. Yet some choose to speak
| truth anyways.
|
| [No, I don't have that kind of fiber myself, sadly.]
| david422 wrote:
| If I heard that, I would definitely be thinking "yes".
| fatherzine wrote:
| Could be. Perhaps the question was asked some time ago,
| received the same answer, and there were no layoffs.
| Consistency is paramount.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The answer is to to be straight up and make it clear that
| you can't answer that specific question in that instance
| because of how the real world works... but reassure people
| that you will be as straightforward and fair as you can be
| when you _can_ answer.
| TylerE wrote:
| Anyone with more than two brain cells will see that as a
| yes.
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| IMO the fact that the employees anticipated that layoffs
| were coming and leadership still didn't preemptively quell
| that sentiment means someone already made a mistake. I'm
| sympathetic to how difficult it can be to relay unpleasant
| news, but it's sort of like getting the lifeboats ready
| before your ship hits the iceberg.
|
| Are MBAs still taught the duties of leadership? Or are they
| just told to get out with enough cash for their next
| venture?
| folkhack wrote:
| > Are MBAs still taught the duties of leadership? Or are
| they just told to get out with enough cash for their next
| venture?
|
| Actively taught or not, capitalism specifically optimizes
| for the latter.
| sklargh wrote:
| A core tenant of any MBA program is to inculcate a duty
| to shareholders vs. employees. Your duty of leadership
| extends as far as it takes to optimize organizational
| outputs for quarterly goals that move share price up.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Employees should take the exact same attitude with their
| job. Your duty as an employee is to optimize your
| compensation ( However you define compensation it doesn't
| have to be just money).
|
| Same thing with honesty. If the employer isn't going to
| give you advanced notice that you may be fired, you have
| no obligation to tell them that you are thinking about
| quitting.
| folkhack wrote:
| Agree.
|
| At almost every place I've worked there's this super
| pervasive "family" notion as-if they wouldn't eject you
| the moment it was in their best interests. I wish we
| could drop that pretense - it's just dishonest.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Then drop it. I'm serious. If the company wants to do
| that whole "we are a family" thing, let them.
|
| While you don't have to be an aggrandizing ass in going
| about it, you don't have to reciprocate the "family ties"
| either.
|
| Be the distant uncle, if you have to (this probably works
| less the higher up the chain you go, however)
| folkhack wrote:
| This is about to be a ton of _personal_ anecdotes that
| outline why "then just drop it" isn't always as simple as
| that.
|
| I often use the "office beers" analogy on here to discuss
| the prevalent requirement of socializing in the workplace
| these days. To me, I have no interest in knocking off at
| 2pm on a Friday to participate in office drinking culture
| and it's 100% screwed me in the past.
|
| To me, I should be able to just work. I have no
| obligation to go go-karting, to drink with you, to talk
| at your toastmasters, to go bar crawl on a RAGBRI bus...
| whatever it may be. I add value by fulfilling my
| obligation of labor. Not by "team building." And, with
| that - I feel that if I achieve my deliverables then I
| should be able to go home and live my private life.
| Simple.
|
| > Be the distant uncle, if you have to (this probably
| works less the higher up the chain you go, however)
|
| You are 100% correct - the higher up you want to get the
| more you have to socialize and pander to the corporate
| "family." I've found this to be ubiquitous across
| employers to the point that I prefer more
| contract/smaller-shop work where it is not as prevalent.
|
| Also, I want to note by being the distant uncle you are
| often hurting yourself for advancement. You have to go
| buddy-buddy with folks to get on their radar, and in a
| sizable team on the west coast there's a good chance one
| of your colleagues is doing just that with your
| management. Regardless of output - it's oft the person
| who has socialized/marketed more that will get the
| advancement.
|
| Sorry - but in my _personal experience_ it is very much
| not as simple as "just drop it" in regards to that family
| pretense. If you even remotely want to "climb the ladder"
| you must participate at some level...
| dvtrn wrote:
| _Also, I want to note by being the distant uncle you are
| often hurting yourself for advancement._
|
| If you don't mind trafficking one personal anecdote for
| another, I've heard this since I entered the corporate
| workforce at 19 (got a wee bit lucky there), and in my
| mid-to-late 30's, I've been _demonstrably_ more
| protective and distant of the boundaries between work and
| self
|
| the result in the last six years has been making more
| money and adding the word "Principal" to my job title.
|
| These are mere anecdotes, I think we've found common
| ground admitting that much, but I don't think I buy into
| many of the notions that continue getting harped on about
| what will and wont "hurt" my career advancement anymore;
| as most of them have just been means of corralling
| behavior and only brought me burnout and stress.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| So your idea is that if you're a VP and your choices are to
| tell everyone the truth or lie to everyone, you'd rather
| lie to save yourself a single day of uncertainty.
|
| Meanwhile, the people you're about to lay off are
| definitely getting laid off anyway, and the people you're
| keeping now have zero reason to trust you or your
| leadership. And your rationalization for this is you're
| doing it for the "good of the many."
|
| This has nothing to do with "a clean conscience." This has
| to do with whether your employees feel that you're being
| honest with them. Even the career-focused snakes don't want
| to work for a boss who lie when asked a direct question.
| llaolleh wrote:
| This. The correct answer is yes we're really sorry there
| will be layoffs.
|
| If there is one thing I've learned in life is that once
| you've betrayed someone's trust it can never be regained
| to the original state.
| bombcar wrote:
| "We believe we are in a stable situation, but depending
| on how the market performs or our sales projections
| (insert whatever here) we may be forced to limit
| additional hiring or even let some employees go. If we
| get to that point, you'll be the first to know as
| security drags you screaming from your desk."
|
| (Probably not the last point, but a decent joke might
| actually work, or, better yet have a "layoff emergency
| warchest" so that everyone knows if they DO get laid off
| they'll get X months severances, or whatever.)
| shagie wrote:
| You have the all hands on the day after the layoff rather
| than the day before the layoff so that the question, if it
| is asked, is asked in private rather than in public.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Who else read that story and is finding themselves having
| trouble figuring out what should have been done between
| "lie" and "don't lie"?
|
| Just curious.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think by the time you get to that point, you have no
| good options.
|
| However, if the status of the company is more adequately
| described to the employees over time, you can "boil the
| frog" as it were, and never have to actually lie but
| still admit that layoffs may be coming if X or Y doesn't
| happen.
|
| I bet it's much MORE common for the lie to happen in pre-
| public stages, where they're still trying to "sell" the
| company as perfectly sized and poised to grow to
| investors, VCs, etc.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Give a non-answer explaining that you need to keep all
| options on the table at all times.
|
| Or
|
| Don't have all-hands meetings with open, unknown
| questions where you are forced to decide between lying to
| your staff or terrifying your staff.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I have learned the hard way that CEOs are some of the most
| dishonest people on the planet, right up there next to
| salespeople.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Just to provide a counterpoint, my personal experiences
| with the CEO of my company have been consistently positive.
| I consider him worthy of my trust, and I am a naturally
| skeptical person. The company has grown to hundreds of
| employees, but he's still approachable and direct as ever.
|
| It puts a smile on my face when upper management squats in
| a conference room I need for a scheduled interview, and I
| can tell the candidate they just booted the CEO and
| director of engineering.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I've met a few, and they are a rare treasure, but in
| nearly every case my time with them is limited as
| something _always_ happens that sees them gone. Whether
| it 's retirement, getting ousted by the board, selling
| the company, or death (by cancer), it seems like whoever
| is brought in afterwards is always worse.
|
| It really seems like wherever I get hired, the situation
| always changes dramatically after 1-2 years and the
| workplace goes downhill. My work life is like a
| continuous series of bait-and-switches. It is really,
| really tiresome.
|
| Here is to hoping that self-employment is not so
| dramatic.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I've been at 2 smaller companies when layoffs were on the
| table. One handled it great, one like crap.
|
| Company #1 had a meeting and just plain out said it.. "we
| need to cut 20% of the payroll budget. So we need to decide
| between 20% layoffs and 20% pay cuts." We took the latter
| option as we liked our team and the company recovered in a
| couple years.
|
| Company #2 did the traditional "everything is fine" even
| though everyone knew it was bullshit and no one was surprised
| when they announced the layoffs. Most of the people already
| had started looking along with a lot of other people. They
| laid off around 25% but due the the way they handled it they
| suffered around 50% attrition.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I've been in quite a few situations over the last three years
| where you want scream that shit is about to hit the fan
| because you have access to privileged info, but you can't. I
| did have to avoid a lot of conversation or point blank say I
| don't know. Not trying to excuse the CEO,but often it's a bit
| more complicated than yes or no.
| JieJie wrote:
| I was working at Wizards of the Coast in the '90s (pre-Hasbro),
| right after we moved to a huge and expensive building. They
| laid off a ton of staff that winter to cut costs.
|
| Just completely senseless.
| madamelic wrote:
| I genuinely think there is like "Curse of the New Office".
|
| Nearly every place I've been ends up either having layoffs or
| collapsing entirely 6 - 12 months after moving into a bigger
| office.
| hysan wrote:
| CEO of my current company pitched partnering with a consultancy
| to fill our resource needs (can't hire anyone). During an org
| wide meeting, he promised that this wasn't going to result in
| layoffs. That we needed to work with them so that they could
| help. Thus ensued 6 weeks of helping them learn our systems and
| business processes in a process, that in hindsight, felt like
| knowledge transferring. After that, a bunch of people were laid
| off without warning and the CEO has still yet to address the
| org directly.
|
| I have yet to figure out my takeaway from this experience, but
| it makes me wonder if I prefer incompetence or dishonesty.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Coming out and saying there won't be any layoffs is code for,
| there's going to be layoffs.
| bombcar wrote:
| Dishonesty you can work around, incompetence is like
| insanity; you can't plan for it.
|
| And above is literally the plot of Office Space.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Unfortunately you are right, dishonesty is something you
| can account for. I'll dishonest over incompetent any day of
| the week. At least dishonest bears less risk of running an
| org into the ground than incompetent. if it is both, run as
| fast as possible.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| A long time ago, in my Fortune 250, there were rumors flying
| about a merger with another company. So much so, that the CEO
| issued a company-wide email that, no, they "were not
| entertaining any credible offers at the time." I thought that
| was a weasely way of saying "no," but I was more naive then,
| and believed him. A month later, they announced that were
| "merging" with another Fortune 250.
|
| That company sold our company off, piece by piece, in a classic
| raid to prop up their failing business, and then divested the
| last, biggest piece as private equity. Our CEO was promised the
| merged CEO position within 2 years. They pulled the ripcord on
| his golden parachute 1 year into it. He got $19M for the
| selling out the company, and $15M more for f*cking off, and
| THEN had the audacity to walk into the old HQ and cry about it.
|
| His bio at IU's "notable alumni" says he "retired." Screw him.
| It was a great company to have worked for, which had lasted
| over 100 years, and it was gone in 3 years. It's been 20 years
| now, and I'm still mad about it. He says he regrets it (https:/
| /web.archive.org/web/20150726032123/https://www.ibj.c...), but
| when a board throws tens or hundreds of millions at someone,
| they usually take the deal, and act accordingly.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > but when a board throws tens or hundreds of millions at
| someone, they usually take the deal, and act accordingly.
|
| Board also has to act in favor of what's better financially
| for the company. If that CEO did not have agree for merger,
| they'd have fired him. At least, he'd have dignity if he
| choose that and your respect as well, but that does not have
| paid his bills. I'm not sidelining with anyone.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| But they didn't have to lie about it.
| [deleted]
| bink wrote:
| They're in a pretty tough position if they're negotiating
| a merger/purchase. Don't those talks usually include an
| agreement not to disclose them? Something about not
| wanting it to be used to solicit competing offers?
|
| If they're in the middle of talks and someone blabs and
| an employee asks about it, they effectively either have
| to blow up the deal, lie, or say "I can't talk about it"
| (which would be seen as a yes anyways).
| Zobat wrote:
| There's every possibility that they had to lie about it.
|
| The rules are strict about how and when you can release
| information that can or will affect the value (or
| valuation) of the company. You being told "in advance"
| that a company will be letting people go gives you
| "inside information" and the opportunity to buy or sell
| your shares before everybody else knows about it.
|
| So while it seems unethical to lie to your face telling
| the truth might be illegal.
| HFguy wrote:
| They are not legally obligated to lie. They are legally
| obligated to not say certain things. Which is different.
|
| So, they should just say, that, as always, it is a
| possibility. Which is both true and doesn't provide info
| they shouldn't.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > So, they should just say, that, as always, it is a
| possibility. Which is both true and doesn't provide info
| they shouldn't.
|
| Is there anyone on earth who would not interpret "it is a
| possibility" as "pack your bags" ?
| handoflixue wrote:
| "We're legally obliged not to talk about that topic"
| seems pretty safe, especially if you use it consistently.
| The more it gets used, the less people can infer anything
| useful from it, so it's also a valuable norm to
| encourage.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The incompetence was well on display anyway with their
| acquisition binge.
|
| Now that reality is coming back into vogue, a lot more
| companies than Unity are going to be realizing that revenue,
| unit economics and profitability actually matter, and most of
| the high flyers of the last ten years are poorly structured for
| it.
| munificent wrote:
| I think people like Riccitiello are perfectly happy with a
| reputation that is "Will say whatever bullshit to employees as
| needed by the situation but is able to generate revenue for the
| company."
|
| No one ever fired a CEO for lying. They get fired when the
| stock price goes down.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| John Riccitiello, in his tenure as President and COO of EA,
| already had a significant negative reputation among gamers
| following the games business world...
| meesles wrote:
| I think the repercussions are just so small that it makes sense
| to act like this.
|
| As an employee, your opinion of the CEO bears little. We've
| read on HN the few stories of only the most-qualified people
| being able to cause a stir in high-profile companies when they
| don't want to work for someone. That's not most of us.
|
| On the flipside for the CEO, the board is happy with how they
| kept employees happy until the layoffs and then cut costs.
| Shareholders are happy that costs were cut. Other execs are
| happy that the CEO took the heat. In that CEO's circle, they
| did a good job and will be hired again to do the same.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yeah what does NOT lying get them? Almost nothing. Laid off
| folks would still be upset about being laid off. If they lie
| they get a few more weeks of work from these employees.
|
| It sucks but I wouldnt hold my breath on this ever changing. If
| things don't look good at your company interview elsewhere.
| Dont trust leadership because they will say what they have to
| to keep the business going, not to keep you employed.
| foobarian wrote:
| Add to that that they probably already had a finalized list.
| And not lying would probably cause a panic that might cause
| many people not on the list to leave. It's just very
| disruptive to an established plan.
| tyleo wrote:
| I wonder if we will see a Unity acquisition by one of the big
| tech companies soon. Microsoft in particular would have an
| interest given: 1. Their huge gaming org 2. They made C#
| chunkyguy wrote:
| I would guess Apple, given how much money they're making off
| Unity casual games
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220609074757/https://www.visua...
| suby wrote:
| Apple will never buy Unity. They do not care about video
| games.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Been thinking this as well. At this point, it will either be
| Meta, Apple, or Google.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| I hope people are aware that the layoffs reported in news/media
| are just the tip of the iceberg. All the layoffs aren't
| exceptions, they're the current norm.
|
| In case you're unaware, the world is currently going through the
| early stage of a _global economic meltdown_ , which is why
| there's so many layoffs happening right now.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I would not be so truly pessimistic.
|
| The current issues are mostly short-term issues (Chinese
| lockdowns disrupting delivery chains and the Russian invasion
| of Ukraine plus sanctions driving up gas and oil prices), and
| the currently reported layoffs tend to be startups that are
| trying to cut burn rates now that the flow of extremely cheap
| VC is drying up.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The Russian invasion is the tip of the iceberg. I regard it
| as the frist (large) crack of post cold war world order and
| plainly the United States, who built that order, either
| doesn't care of its fall or even wants to cut it down.
| yonaguska wrote:
| I'm sorry but the Russia invasion of Ukraine and related
| sanctions aren't what have been driving inflation or gas
| price hikes, at least in the US. It's poor domestic policies
| being blame shifted to Putin. We're finally feeling the
| inflation from global lockdowns and gas prices have been
| steadily increasing since 2020, before Putin's invasion.
|
| These issues are not going to be short term either, as the
| current administration is celebrating the increased prices as
| a means of accelerating a transition to green energy, all
| while having no plan to really implement more green energy
| via increased nuclear capacity.
|
| So we have an administration that is unwilling to increase
| gas production and can't get an audience with OPEC to
| increase imports.
|
| Just be ready for the shock this fall when meat prices
| skyrocket. As Union Pacific has been restricting fertilizer
| shipments specifically during the critical planting season,
| and farming is highly dependent on Diesel usage. But at least
| we're subsidizing more ethanol in our gas...a less efficient
| fuel source than.. actual gas.
|
| In summation, my pessimism is off the charts. What we are
| going to see is going to destroy large parts of the middle
| class, poor people, especially children in America(doubly so
| for less wealthy countries that depend on America's economy)
| will starve, and any tech industries targeting middle class
| consumers are going to shrink. I sincerely hope I'm wrong,
| and I welcome any perspectives that alleviate this pessimism.
|
| https://www.freightwaves.com/news/fertilizer-maker-faults-
| un...
|
| "[When] it comes to the gas prices, we're going through an
| incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing,
| when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be
| stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,"
| Biden said during a press conference in Japan following his
| meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| If you stopped reading doom and gloom websites (or Fox
| News) you would know that OPEC is _unwilling_ to increase
| production because they like high gas prices and want to
| maximize their oil income while they still can while the
| West shifts to EVs.
|
| It's a self-perpetuating cycle: the high prices drive
| increased demand for EV alternatives, which leads to higher
| gas prices so that OPEC members can maintain their
| revenues.
|
| Also, we could double our oil extraction each year and that
| wouldn't make a meaningful dent in gas prices, and it might
| even increase prices even more, because domestic oil is
| expensive to extract in the U.S.; the cheap and easy fields
| were tapped out decades ago. Indeed, part of the oil crash
| a few years ago was the result of OPEC increasing
| production, which lowered oil prices below the point it was
| profitable to extract from most U.S. and Canadian sources.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| For a different perspective, stop reading the "doom and
| gloom" web sites and go outside. Or maybe just read their
| stories from five years ago, predicting crises that never
| happened. The world isn't going to end. Things will turn
| out alright.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Maybe I'm just scarred by the fact that I grew up poor
| when the 2008 crisis hit. So for many people, it might
| have just been a hiccup, a budget cut here or there. For
| me, it meant not eating every day.
|
| This is already a reality for many Americans. So it might
| turn out alright for you...but it will not turn out
| alright for many many other people.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I do get their point re/ tax base though.
|
| There is a _ton_ of stuff to do: decades of deferred
| maintenance, resilience to climate change in existing
| infrastructure, building out new climate friendly
| infrastructure, prepare society for the inevitable job
| losses due to automation (e.g. trucking, warehouse
| jobs)... all of that will cost a lot of money over the
| next decades, the current administration doesn 't have
| the political majority necessary to raise taxes, and it
| is _highly_ likely that the Republicans and with them
| their constant "defund the big state" destructionism
| against public institutions will be in the political
| majority by end of this year and in Presidency in two
| years.
|
| The result will _not_ be nice.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| There will certainly be big problems to deal with, and
| terrible events. I grew up in the 1970s with headlines
| dominated by wars in the Middle East and many other
| places, terrorism, inflation, the threat of nuclear war,
| apocalyptic cults, 'malaise' and cynicism, pollution,
| violent crime, political corruption...and basically
| everything you mentioned too. With all that, things
| worked out OK.
| yonaguska wrote:
| I do appreciate hearing that. My parents aren't as
| worried as I am either, but they've also turned their
| backyard into a very large garden just in case. They also
| lean heavily on religion as a means of assurance, which I
| find less comforting.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > With all that, things worked out OK.
|
| Yes they did, because _politicians did their jobs_. CFCs
| and lead were banned, pollution was beginning to be
| regulated by the EPA and European counterparts, there
| were a number of de-armament agreements worldwide, and
| actions were taken to combat crime and corruption.
|
| Additionally, just look at the aftermath of neoliberalism
| and privatization waves of the 90s or the 2008ff
| financial crises: _millions_ of people lost their jobs,
| many millions who graduated right during these times have
| lower economic prospects for large parts of their life
| [1]. For _them_ , nothing worked out OK.
|
| And these days? US Congress has been gridlocked since
| Obama and McConnell's obstructionism, and here in Europe
| Russia has invested many millions into propping up far-
| right obstructionist forces as well. We can't get
| anything done anymore.
|
| [1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-
| brief/recessi...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It worked out, but just took like ten full years of pain.
| mythrwy wrote:
| The world will end. For some people. Because of idiocy.
| That is a big deal that is not solved by "going outside".
| littlestymaar wrote:
| There are short term issues causing a supply shock, which in
| turns is causing inflation, triggering central banks credit
| tightening that will cause a medium term contraction. But
| government deficit have been high for a long time (because of
| lax taxation on the wealthy individuals and global companies)
| and debt is high: with interest rates rising and economic
| downturn, government budgets will come under pressure.
|
| Then you can have two outcomes: an massive tax increase where
| the money is, or public spendings will be cut and the economy
| will tank even more, spiralling out of control (the Greek
| scenario). Unfortunately, I expect the second scenario to be
| much more likely than the first one...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Solely taxing the rich and corporations isn't enough to
| stop deficit spending, spending cuts would be needed as
| well. In the US, if you taxed the top 1% at 100% (and it
| somehow didn't have massive second order effects) you would
| only generate about $800 billion in tax revenue. Current
| federal tax revenue is about $3.7 trillion, and a decent
| chunk of that is already coming from the wealthy and
| corporations. The current federal budget is around $6
| trillion. And individual states, counties, cities, and
| other entities like school districts and water boards also
| still need tax revenue too, mind you.
|
| Regardless of one's feelings on raising taxes, solely
| raising taxes is simply not enough to get rid of deficit
| spending. Pretty much all governments (and all western
| governments especially) spend far more than they can bring
| in as revenue. This ends up getting paid for long term by
| the general public in a lot of different ways, such as
| inflation, bankrupt retirement and healthcare programs, and
| more.
| smolder wrote:
| > In the US, if you taxed the top 1% at 100%
|
| Top 1% of what, earners? Is this just 100% on their
| income? Does it include capital gains? Does it include
| corporations? Be clear about what you're hypothetically
| taxing so we can discuss what else is being left on the
| table. I'm sure the answer is "a lot", despite the severe
| sounding "100%".
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Keep in mind that for every 1% of GDP of public spending
| you cut, you're going to cut GDP by a little more than 1%
| (more like 1.2%), which will then cut the federal revenue
| by an additional .3% of GDP.
|
| You just cannot cut spendings during a recession unless
| you want to go straight to disaster. Greece is a great
| example of that.
|
| > In the US, if you taxed the top 1% at 100% (and it
| somehow didn't have massive second order effects) you
| would only generate about $800 billion in tax revenue.
|
| Which also means that by getting back to the post New
| Deal tax level (~80%) on those people alone, you'd get
| $640 billion! And I'm not talking about some communist
| fantasy (like your 100%), I'm talking about Nixon's tax
| policy!
|
| Having done so in the decade prior to the pandemic would
| have massively improved things with regard to the current
| federal debt.
|
| And how about taxing fortune 500 companies to the levels
| they're supposed to be taxed? That's also hundreds of
| billions missing every year.
|
| > Regardless of one's feelings on raising taxes, solely
| raising taxes is simply not enough to get rid of deficit
| spending.
|
| But that's just factually not true! even with the mere
| tax experiment I did above (that is, without making Apple
| pay their taxes) you can bring the US budget close to an
| equilibrium in the 2000-2020 era, despite the 2008 crisis
| and its costs!
|
| That's OK if a government runs a budget with a deficit
| during a crisis (like the pandemic, or financial crisis),
| it's not OK that the US (and most western governments
| actually) have been running with a deficit during the
| 2012-2020 era, because of tax cuts on the wealthiest.
| That's how we ended up where we are now.
|
| Government deficit are a political choice, since the 80s
| we've decided to borrow money instead of getting it
| trough taxes, but the money was there all along.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep since the 70s there's been an insane explosion of
| private wealth and an insane implosion of public wealth
| (infrastructure, etc.). On purpose.
|
| It's what happens when the foxes are in charge of the hen
| house.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Pretty much all governments (and all western
| governments especially) spend far more than they can
| bring in as revenue.
|
| No, they tax the rich and corporations way too low. Back
| in the 70s/80s, in Germany almost every little village
| had enough tax base to fund the construction and
| operation of swimming halls, there were _massive_
| buildouts of all kinds of infrastructure from railways
| over highways to gigantic airports, everyone got decent
| streets, electricity, water, phone lines and other
| utilities. All funded with taxpayer money, as investors
| in infrastructure simply were not a thing, not even
| legal.
|
| Then in the 90s, neo-liberal privatization vandals sold
| off everything to the highest bidder, and now the owner
| class keeps skimming off profits while socializing losses
| (e.g. by having the government pay for
| Kurzarbeit/paycheck protection programs) in crisis time.
|
| Additionally, the CEO wage gap exploded - from 20:1/1965
| and 58:1 in 1989 [1] to 670:1 last year [2], and on top
| of that comes crap such as share buybacks which only
| serve to benefit the elites.
|
| [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-
| compensation-2018/
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-
| wage-gap-...
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Additionally, the CEO wage gap exploded - from
| 20:1/1965 and 58:1 in 1989 [1] to 670:1 last year [2],
| and on top of that comes crap such as share buybacks
| which only serve to benefit the elites.
|
| Wow, it was already 300:1 a few years back (2014 iirc),
| that's so sick it still managed to double...
| altdataseller wrote:
| No they are the exception. Most of these layoffs are happening
| primarily in funded startups, not big companies.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _these layoffs are happening primarily in funded startups,
| not big companies_
|
| Or small businesses. Labor conditions are still historically,
| if no longer extraordinarily, tight [1].
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FRBKCLMCIM
| rawbot wrote:
| Tough to hear. At a time it was the only company keeping Epic in
| check (after the horrors of UE3), probably the reason they had
| such an open and lax license for UE4.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I'm surprised that neither of the big tech companies are
| building their own competing game/graphics engine.
| pid-1 wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, Amazon has its own game engine.
| mrec wrote:
| That was Amazon Lumberyard, a licensed fork of CryEngine. I
| don't think it ever got much traction and has recently been
| rebranded as "Open 3D Engine" and handed over to the Linux
| Foundation.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I heard just yesterday that Lumberyard and o3de are
| different forks and that Amazons game teams are not using
| o3de.
|
| I'm interested in o3de, but the website needs to list
| games that have actually shipped on it. As far as I can
| see, nothing ever has.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I wonder if they're trapped in a Godot/Epic sandwich right now.
| I moved from Unity to Godot more or less and while it's not as
| good, and I'd not use it for commercial stuff (similarly, the
| Unreal Engine is for my purposes waaay too heavyweight/heavy-
| duty), it's probably eaten a lot of the good will/vibes
| audience that Unity enjoyed. (Also Epic donated 250k to Unity a
| few years ago - https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-
| was-awarded-epi... ). It might be the Godot side is
| insignificant, but I do wonder! Unity was and remains a cool
| engine on the whole, I think.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Godot is nowhere, it's not used by anything major. It's not
| even a drop in the ocean.
| datalopers wrote:
| If the goal was actually releasing a game, why would anyone
| choose Godot over Unity or Unreal? Feels like it's a hobby
| or a statement of "I'm 100% non-commercial FOSS!"
| marcodiego wrote:
| Every time I see articles about Godot on HN I get the
| impression that it is much easier to beginner developers,
| hobbyists and amateurs. I think the only thing keeping Unity
| popular among these segments is popularity. This will
| probably be fixed after Godot 4.0 release.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Godot is insignificant but growing, that's the best way to
| put it. Godot has a lot of pain points, lack of knowledge and
| best practices which most Unity devs already figured out
| about Unity. Especially indie 3D is still kind of a pain in
| Godot.
|
| Mostly waiting for Godot 4 and hoping a lot of those pains
| will be solved, both 2D and 3D.
| mcv wrote:
| From what I understand (I have no personal experience with
| it), Godot is better than Unity at 2D games, but not
| remotely as good at 3D.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| The main benefit of Godot 2D is that it is _strictly_ 2D,
| 2D and 3D are split. If you do things without needing 2D,
| it will edge out over Unity (UI tends to be better, pains
| with window sizing etc. tend to be better than Unity).
| The moment you want any 3D feature, you either do a
| shoddy hackjob retroactively fitting it into your 2D
| game, or you rewrite a lot of things to get 3D. Unity 's
| main benefit is everything essentially being a 3D game,
| and 2D games being hamfisted in a 3D scene, making it so
| adding the slightest 3D feature is far easier. Simple
| example, if you wanted to spin sprites a la Paper Mario,
| you can't just do that in Godot 2D, but you can easily do
| it in Unity '2D'.
|
| On top, Godot's general lack of community and features
| still means going beyond a certain level of polish, even
| in 2D, becomes a bit more annoying. Support for 3rd party
| plug-ins are limited*. VFX examples are extremely
| limited. Particles are still fairly barebones in features
| compared to Unity (Godot 4 is bringing updates to this),
| and Unity has the added benefit of having a far larger
| community. In general you'll find similar issues you'd
| find in Unity, with less history or support to get you
| out of a bind.
|
| Godot does particularly well in fairly simple games and
| styles, but the moment you go beyond that scope it's
| basically a toss-up whether you're better or worse off
| using Unity right now. That _should_ be changing in the
| future as more people adopt Godot, but it isn 't as cut-
| and-dry as "2D for Godot is better". Anyone saying that
| may as well vouch for GameMaker, Ren'py, RPGMaker or
| something else based on their requirements.
|
| *: Especially art. There are tons of art workflows being
| popularized now to make art production easier for
| artists, many coming from Japan. Their support in Unity
| is already fairly minimal, in Godot it is practically
| non-existent. I imagine having good plugins for say,
| Spine 2D, Live2D etc. would help bring over the mobile
| crowd in particular and cross over to the PC/console
| markets as indies start trying more than just pixel art.
| [deleted]
| mattlondon wrote:
| I recently just picked up Godot after years of tinkering
| with unity as a hobbyist. On the whole I like Godot and
| will probably continue to use it instead of unity
|
| I am not a pro, but it feels like there are a few rough
| edges in Godot that will trip up someone used to unity.
| E.g. the script editor UI is weird (it has reasonable
| actual code editing, but the layout and how you select
| files is weird and really unintuitive IMO - no tabs, shows
| you all scripts and not just the ones in the scene you are
| editing etc), you cannot easily "view"/"find" a node in the
| scene by double-clicking, you can easily dig into an
| instanced scene to edit it but there is no intuitive way of
| going "back up" so it is easy to get lost in the embedded
| scenes-within-scenes, you can't move the panes around in
| the editor how you'd like, you cannot pause the game and
| "view" the scene in the editor (making debug for collisions
| etc difficult).
|
| It is taking some getting used-to. I hope v4 sorts some of
| these niggles out.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >you cannot pause the game and "view" the scene in the
| editor (making debug for collisions etc difficult).
|
| Do you mean actually pausing the game (play using the
| editor, then pause) and then checking the remote tree?
| You can check the remote tree while the game is paused. I
| have noticed breakpoints (in C#) tend to freeze updates
| on the remote tree though. Additionally, you can show
| collision shapes during gameplay by toggling it.
|
| >E.g. the script editor UI is weird (it has reasonable
| actual code editing, but the layout and how you select
| files is weird and really unintuitive IMO)
|
| Big reason I use VS Code to edit. Unfortunately shaders
| are still best written in-engine and the shader window
| has a really, really annoying tendency of removing itself
| once selecting a different node without selecting a
| different shader. Funny since animation and audio tabs
| don't show the same behavior (the animation tab stays
| locked until you select another animation tree, audio
| behaves similarly).
|
| >so it is easy to get lost in the embedded scenes-within-
| scenes
|
| My biggest problem with scenes, I can get used to scenes-
| within-scenes by keeping things on a code level, but
| nodes tend to be fairly expensive and making things like
| components isn't the most intuitive in Godot coming from
| Unity, Unreal or anything similar. If the community was a
| bit more mature and bigger, someone would've probably
| figured out best practices to avoid these things rather
| it looking like a flaw in the system itself.
| mattlondon wrote:
| The remote tree is useful, but a fully visual
| representation in the editor would be best. It seems that
| I can force the _game_ to reflect what I set in the
| editor , but not make the editor visually show what is
| happening in the game at that specific moment.
|
| E.g. imagine I am creating a platformer (for a totally
| hypothetical example) with a moving platform. There is a
| bug in the game where the player sometimes drops through
| the moving platform. In unity I can pause the game when
| the bug happens and then in the editor I can visually see
| all of the colliders and so on and quickly work out what
| is happening (e.g. perhaps the collider for the platform
| is too short or something and so the player misses it).
| In Godot it seems there is no way of doing this. Yes I
| can use the inspector on the remote tree, but this is not
| easy to visualise the colliders and their overlapping.
| Add in 3D and it gets even harder. Perhaps I am just
| missing some button somewhere? Debugging collision issues
| in Godot is proving to be a real pain in the backside
| without this feature.
|
| I guess that for Godot it just shells out a new process
| to run the game and the game is not running in the editor
| as it appears to be in unity, and that makes it hard to
| visualise the state in the editor.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| Isn't Godot pushing (though not mandating) users to utilise
| it's own little niche scripting language? Good luck switching
| industries with that experience...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| GDScript is basically just a weird Python, but they also
| officially support C#, C, and C++. Also there are
| community-developed extensions for Rust and a few other
| languages. Also the C# support will be improving
| drastically with Godot 4.0 when they switch from Mono to
| .NET 6. You cam already build a preview version of Godot 4
| with .NET 6 support if you do some tweaking, the work is
| pretty far along.
|
| That said, most of the documentation and guides assume
| you're using GDScript or sometimes maybe C#.
| krapp wrote:
| The languages listed as "production ready" here[0] are
| Javascript, Lua, Nim, Rust and Typescript.
|
| Also I would hesitate to call GDScript a weird Python. It
| shares some of Python's syntax, like significant
| whitespace, but beyond that it's a completely different
| beast.
|
| There is an actual Python for Godot project[1] but I
| don't know how close it is to ready for prime time.
|
| [0]https://github.com/Vivraan/godot-lang-support
|
| [1]https://github.com/touilleMan/godot-python
| danbolt wrote:
| GDScript feels really nicely-integrated with the scene
| hierarchy and memory management. I really feel in love
| with the reference-counting setup it utilizes.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I spent months building a game in Godot only to discover
| that if you save a reference to a game object in the
| script, and the object is destroyed, the underlying
| engine can reuse the handle for a new object, resulting
| in your script pointing at the wrong object.
|
| Its a massive, completely unacceptable bug and it was in
| the engine for years. I lost all faith the the Godot team
| and will never go back.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It's not. They are trying to fit the newest .NET in Godot
| 4, for example. C# 9 and 10 will surely be transferable
| psyc wrote:
| In my opinion, UE being "too heavyweight" is more perception
| than reality. I didn't find it more difficult to learn than
| Unity. Sure, unimaginable power is there, but you don't have
| to use it, and some of it has very little mental overhead
| (almost 'for free').
|
| I used Unity daily for 4 years, both at work (at Hololens and
| Oculus) and for a few personal projects and indie games, one
| of which was much more complex than anything I ever did at
| work. When I first started, I remember this feeling of being
| unchained and my productivity as a game developer going
| through the roof. (For the prior 15 years I'd been building
| directly on top of DirectX.)
|
| When I switched to UE5, I had that same feeling again. Of
| being let loose or given superpowers. I would not go back for
| anything. Among many other factors, access to the source code
| is game-changing and should not by any means be
| underestimated.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Not OP but in my experience, heavyweight is in reference to
| the sheer size, feature set and the resultant system
| requirements of the engine, not that it's more or less
| difficult to learn.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Among many other factors, access to the source code is
| game-changing and should not by any means be
| underestimated._
|
| It is great of you know c++, but if you aren't, Unreal
| neither offers a scripting language, nor does access to the
| source code offer any benefit. I'm hopefully waiting the
| scripting language they announced last year. (Verse?)
| unoti wrote:
| Unreal's Blueprints handle what you need for a scripting
| language and then some. If you spend a few months
| learning C++ so that this is no longer an obstacle, then
| start using Unreal to do a project, you'll discover that
| it'll be a very long time before you actually need to use
| your C++ skills. It's true C++ is easier to express
| certain things in a smaller amount of screen real estate.
|
| But Blueprints are pretty darn amazing. They have
| subclasses, inheritance, composition, interfaces, public
| and private variables, functions, enums, events, user-
| defined structs, network replication, server-only
| functions, broadcast functions, user interface
| interaction. You might say to yourself "Yes, but I have a
| table of 5000 datapoints in Excel I need to work with";
| you can put those into a datatable and work with them
| just fine from Blueprints. You can use the tools to
| visually edit curves of data, for example for tweaking
| the effectiveness of some gameplay system like armor or
| experience or energy consumption. You can write GPU
| shaders in Blueprints, too, astonishingly easily.
| [deleted]
| gpm wrote:
| Blueprints are a pretty fully featured scripting
| language, they just happen to not be text based.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Why not just learn c++? There are probably millions of
| tutorials in general and probably thousands specific to
| UE.
| psyc wrote:
| If you're capable of developing a game at all, I wager
| you're capable of learning enough C++. But Blueprints are
| the first-class citizens these days. The most advanced
| visual programming solution I've ever seen, and a joy to
| use.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Ah, I meant the basic engine is heavy - simple games take
| longer to load, your game is likely to be an order of
| magnitude larger in file size because of the luxuriant
| affordances of the graphic pipeline. I'm pretty sure if you
| compare average game size on disk between the two engines
| there'd be a big difference (even taking team size and
| development time into account).
|
| Also the unreal editor is more likely to set my fan
| spinning in a distressing manner - I appreciate how light
| unity's editor by comparison in terms of not using many
| system resources - easy to run on my laptop.
|
| (I worked with UE engine professionally back in the old
| times, but have never released any personal projects with
| it, despite having played around with every year or so).
|
| About the engine features, yeah unity has as many
| ridiculous corners as unreal nowadays - I miss some of the
| simpler pipelines (the old animation one is better for
| simple 3D stuff for instance vs the giant state machine...)
|
| Agreed that source code access is great. Unity's tech
| support used to be pathologically unresponsive. Having
| source access would've saved me a lot of stress and tears
| :/ (Thankfully the last time I was working on a unity
| project they were helpful about reporting status of bug
| fixes and the like, and actually getting things fixed. So
| props to unity for fixing that).
| Thaxll wrote:
| Epic is nowhere to be seen in the mobile space though.
| terafo wrote:
| Highest grossing mobile game(PUBG mobile) uses ue4. I
| wouldn't say that's "nowhere to be seen.
| jpgvm wrote:
| This happens all to often though. Small company comes out
| swinging to upset the status-quo, essentially poking the bear.
|
| From there it either plays out one of two ways depending on how
| competent the management of the incumbent is.
|
| 1. They underestimate and continually disregard the startup.
| This generally leads to AMD vs Intel situation. Don't do this.
|
| 2. Understand the threat they pose and systematically match all
| of their advantages, smothering them with investment they can't
| afford to keep up with. This is essentially what Epic did here
| and generally what you should always do if you have a dominant
| market position and can afford it.
|
| Unity is left in a bad situation because accessibility to their
| engine was it's key draw. A few years ago people also felt it
| was an easier engine to develop games on but that viewpoint has
| been shifting back to UE4 as of late because of the difficulty
| studios have had "actually shipping" Unity based titles, let
| along long-term maintenance issues. In terms of pure quality
| Unreal has generally (but not always) been on top and
| definitely in terms of capability and performance.
|
| Doesn't help that Epic has an enormous cash-cow in the form of
| Fortnite while Unity has next to no income outside of it's in-
| game advertising business. They also bet heavily on VR and that
| hasn't panned out to be as profitable as people thought it
| would be with the majority of revenue in the VR/AR space being
| heavily skewed into the enterprise, government and military
| verticals which aren't where Unity performs well.
| benstrumental wrote:
| I feel like this happened to Gitlab / GitHub as well. Gitlab
| was gaining a ton of popularity and momentum with their free
| private repositories and built-in CI testing infrastructure.
| Then GitHub swooped in and offered all the same things,
| taking the wind out of Gitlab's sails.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Didn't those changes only happen after Microsoft sunk their
| money in to buy GitHub?
| kajaktum wrote:
| >Doesn't help that Epic has an enormous cash-cow in the form
| of Fortnite while Unity has next to no income outside of it's
| in-game advertising business.
|
| Isn't Genshin Impact really, really, really massively
| profitable? It would be really sad if Unity takes a constant
| revenue instead of percentage-based off of that lol
| Grazester wrote:
| "...This generally leads to AMD vs Intel situation. Don't do
| this."
|
| Which situation is that? The one where the major player uses
| its power illegally to stifle its competition?
| cruano wrote:
| I think the one where AMD doubled [1] their market share in
| ~5 years
|
| [1] for x86, went from 17.8% on Q4 2017 to 39.7% on Q3 2021
| as per https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide
| -x86-int...
| largbae wrote:
| Option 3: Buy the upstart a la Instagram.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Ok yeah I missed that one. That obviously happens more
| often than both of these actually.
| [deleted]
| foobiekr wrote:
| This is the first I've heard the claim that VR/AR revenue is
| skewed to enterprise and military. Can you share some links
| on this? I did a search and while I found a lot of discussion
| of _investment_ being skewed in that direction, I'm having
| difficulty finding any evidence that revenue is likewise
| skewed.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Anecdotal from knowing a lot of fellow entrepreneurs in the
| space that pivoted into things like hazardous environment
| training, etc don't have any hard supporting evidence
| sorry. Specifically most of these companies were originally
| trying to do games and/or consumer AR/VR apps but were
| forced to pivot due to lack of traction.
| foobiekr wrote:
| For what it's worth, I have a very, very hard time
| believing that the _revenue_ in the AR/VR space outside
| of games is even 5% of the total. If it was a big market,
| you wouldn't see companies like Microsoft and to a lesser
| extent WEbex etc. floundering so hard with their non-
| game-focused products. Even 5% seems unbelievable
| generous given that, for example, Webex Hologram has $0
| revenue and Microsoft's DoD Hololens project is all but
| dead on launch.
| gautamb0 wrote:
| I've been in the enterprise vr industry for almost 7
| years, and you're correct with your estimate being very
| close to where I'd put it. The vast majority of revenue
| is from gaming.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Seems like a weird way to frame things. Epic does a lot more
| for indie developers in terms of free stuff, transparency on
| the direction of the engine, the engine being source available,
| and so on. Unity is still the more common engine choice for
| indie games.
|
| Unity also generally seems to be terribly run whereas epic
| seems very solid, in no smal part due to having a huge cash cow
| with fortnite.
|
| It may have been true a long time ago but I would reckon it's
| epic leading the charge these days for what we would want to
| see from an engine company.
| bootloop wrote:
| Epic did nothing for indies before Unity3d distrusted their
| market. Before Unreal was a big player game engine with a
| high upfront cost.
| rawbot wrote:
| This was only true from UE4 onwards. Unity started pressuring
| Epic when their latest product was UE3.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| I am not too surprised but at the same time they always have SO
| many job postings up on gamejobs.co
| programmarchy wrote:
| Could this be trimming the fat before a potential acquisition by
| Apple?
|
| I noticed quite a lot of Unity talk in WWDC this year, even
| helping developers add a11y to their Unity games, whereas Unreal
| Engine was not mentioned at all.
|
| So I could see Apple adopting an engine like Unity to help build
| out their games and AR offerings.
|
| SceneKit and SpriteKit have received very little attention over
| the past few years and RealityKit is still anemic in terms of
| features.
|
| Unity could also be a weapon to wield against their newfound
| rival, Epic.
|
| On the other hand, Unity would be an awkward fit into the Apple
| tech ecosystem because of its reliance on C#.
|
| It's also buggy as others have mentioned, but Apple has the
| resources to pay down their technical debt.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > whereas Unreal Engine was not mentioned at all.
|
| Granted, Apple is still not very happy with Epic which does
| trickle down.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| for the sake of accessibility can we just write accessibility.
| gallerdude wrote:
| IIRC, macOS was the first platform it was released on.
| fortyseven wrote:
| Indeed! I remember being irked about Unity only being on Macs
| and seriously thrilled when it finally got a Windows build.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| This is really interesting.
|
| Apple becoming active in games? iGame Pro when?
| programmarchy wrote:
| Well, I didn't mean directly developing games, but look at
| Apple Arcade in the App Store, for example. But hardware-
| wise, yeah I imagine they will develop a VR device at some
| point in the not so distant future.
| criddell wrote:
| Apple is a gaming giant.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-apples-rise-
| to-...
| nottorp wrote:
| If you define gaming as "IAP crapfest".
| criddell wrote:
| I don't.
| snarfy wrote:
| Jobs was always the one against gaming.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| They just spent $1.6 billion in November to buy Peter Jackson's
| Weta Digital (VFX tools)...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Was it cash or stock?
| CharlesW wrote:
| $1 billion in cash and $625 million in stock.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks still too expensive...
| ffhhj wrote:
| And it will take them 5-10 years to integrate all that tech
| into their engine, hoping it's something usable that doesn't
| crash too often, only then they might recover from the gamble.
| palisade wrote:
| In 2019 Unity reached out to me for feedback after I cancelled my
| subscription. I wrote them a pretty long and detailed email on
| how to save the company. But, since most of things I suggested
| never happened they ignored it I guess. Though, they did sort of
| fix integrating a bit and they closed unity connect. However,
| they never replaced unity connect with something else which is a
| problem.
|
| My email response: "1. I felt that throughout my subscription
| that there was a lot of "do it yourself" and "here's a video."
| Some of that is fine, but there's a point at which it all feels a
| little money-grabby. You've paid for the subscription! Now pay
| for some extra lessons, assets, etc.
|
| I would recommend extending personal assistance, e.g. assigning
| someone to be a studio's success guide that sticks around from
| beginning to end.
|
| Also provide a job market similar to fiverr for commissioning
| logo, concept, 3d artists, musicians, sound effect, software
| engineers, etc. If you can't swing that maybe partner with sites
| like upwork or fiverr that can handle it. I'd actually recommend
| the fiverr model for art and content, it's more affordable in the
| long run. Upwork's model is better for developers or writers,
| though. Unity connect felt like walking through a dark alley in a
| 3rd world country waiting to be mugged.
|
| You provided me with plenty of customer loyalty specialists to
| bother me to resubscribe after the project failed, but didn't
| support my efforts when I needed it most. The outcome could have
| been different if there was a support structure along the way
| that assisted in the different aspects of building a successful
| game company and product. That just wasn't there.
|
| 2. Funding is hard to acquire.
|
| Why doesn't unity have it's own
| kickstarter/indiegogo/gofundme/fig system? You're a well known
| company, many people use your engine, and the public at large
| knows about it. Why isn't there an effort to push to help fund
| those using your engine to accomplish something? At the very
| least partner with one of those sites or help guide your
| customers to acquire that type of crowd funding. Epic is doing
| this with a $10mil grant.
|
| And, I don't just mean making a video saying, "If you had
| funding, this is how you'd probably get it." Either provide
| assistants or create a webpage or app that helps guide the
| creation of a game design document, crowd funding pitch, provides
| a timeline for milestones of where your company should be along
| the way to hit their targets, production goals, provide marketing
| expertise, etc.
|
| 3. The community in unity connect itself is rather toxic; filled
| with naysayers, pessimists, and scammers.
|
| You need to revamp unity connect entirely. It is barely
| salvageable as is.
|
| 4. The forums were good.
|
| This was one area I felt shined.
|
| 5. Sometimes assets would try to release a new update and your
| store would block them for months. Other times assets would get
| deprecated or removed that still had life in them. The store also
| lags very badly, logs you out randomly, and is difficult to
| search.
|
| Fix the store. And, make things more convenient for asset
| creators.
|
| 6. Planning and staying on track is also very difficult.
|
| I'd also recommend providing a system similar to Notion,
| Hacknplan, and Slack integrated into your own site for gamedevs
| to build, design, document, and track content and progress. Don't
| overcharge for this. Also, importantly, provide a way for them to
| export their data. If you can't swing that yourselves, again
| partner with someone who already has the infrastructure.
|
| 7. Your company felt very distant; like it exists simply to
| consume money and doesn't care if the customer succeeds or not.
|
| Make your customers feel like you're with them in their struggle.
| Don't wait until they cancel to suddenly be concerned.
|
| 8. Time to iterate is so slow.
|
| When I hit play the game should launch and simulate immediately,
| there's no excuse for the extremely long load times. Unreal
| shines here in comparison. This really slows down development.
|
| I would suggest working on a rewrite of the editor that allows
| real-time runtime editing of content, scripts, prefabs, scenery,
| etc where everything can be saved / persisted without having to
| click Stop. In other words, you're ALWAYS running by default.
| This is how HeroEngine works for example, and it's really cool to
| be able to create an entire world WHILE the game is running. And,
| you can play it multiplayer with the other developers and artists
| while building the world and see collaboratively the pieces come
| together in real-time. While HeroEngine might not be one of your
| big competitors, it's worth looking at how they pulled that
| particular feature off.
|
| There are probably more things that could have helped that I
| can't think of off the top of my head.
|
| Hope that helps."
|
| Addendum: It is also worth noting that Nvidia Omniverse allows
| the real-time editing that I recommended.
| the_duke wrote:
| So your advice for a company that is struggling with their core
| product was: build a Kickstarter alternative, build a Jira
| alternative, build a Slack alternative and also please rewrite
| your editor...
|
| Not very surprising that most of that was ignored.
| palisade wrote:
| Well, I kept pointing out if that wasn't possible to partner
| with another company that already had such an infrastructure.
|
| There is actually a lot of money to be made with the various
| suggestions I made. Ignoring that leaves a lot of potential
| revenue on the table.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| > I would suggest working on a rewrite of the editor that
| allows real-time runtime editing of content, scripts, prefabs,
| scenery, etc where everything can be saved / persisted without
| having to click Stop. In other words, you're ALWAYS running by
| default. This is how HeroEngine works for example, and it's
| really cool to be able to create an entire world WHILE the game
| is running.
|
| I'm pretty sure that's how they demo'd DOTS/ECS lately.
|
| > When I hit play the game should launch and simulate
| immediately, there's no excuse for the extremely long load
| times. Unreal shines here in comparison. This really slows down
| development.
|
| These days (unless you enable domain reloading) entering and
| exiting play mode is... reasonably fast-ish. But yeah, the
| editor could use an overall 10x increase in responsiveness.
| It's pretty bad.
|
| > I would recommend extending personal assistance, e.g.
| assigning someone to be a studio's success guide that sticks
| around from beginning to end.
|
| I thought Unity does this for customers. Not sure how
| extensively. They sell a lot of licenses.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > 7. Your company felt very distant; like it exists simply to
| consume money and doesn't care if the customer succeeds or not.
|
| That makes sense - since probably a majority of their customers
| fail, it they cared about them, they'd be getting a major
| depression.
| mixedbit wrote:
| Unity stock price peak (November 2021) happened when Facebook
| renamed itself to Meta and the market started to see the game
| engine related companies as metaverse companies with much larger
| business prospects. The complete lack of patience of the once
| considered rational market is amazing. How much time did the
| investors anticipate it will take to realize the vision of
| metaverse becoming the next big thing? Less then 7 months? (7
| months after the peak Unity stock is 80% down).
| adam_arthur wrote:
| The metaverse as an investment idea was pretty much non-
| sensical. Way too many years away to have any idea which
| companies will benefit, what the adoption will be, and so on
|
| Roblox, a video game designed for children, was a metaverse
| company? It's just plain stupidity, sorry
|
| The web ended up being big, but good luck picking the winner in
| the dotcom bubble. Metaverse plays today were an irrational
| bubble just the same
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Roblox is not a video game. It's a platform.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Sure, just like Second Life or Warcraft 3 custom maps.
|
| Games with custom content are still games. Somehow
| everybody lost their minds and starting getting erroneous
| grandiose visions about these things.
| [deleted]
| ehnto wrote:
| Games as platforms in general, almost have an inbuilt
| kill-switch in the form of the expected constant progress
| in game technology. The zero-cost switch also ensures a
| smooth exodus when something better inevitably comes
| along, or the platform shoots itself in the foot somehow.
|
| You also have the issue that user-generated content is
| not a business guarantee. Creators are a minority of your
| actual player base, and if your creators move on, the
| rest of your players have nothing to play.
|
| Roblox has a network effect, but history shows gamers
| have no issue abandoning perfectly good games just
| because it's not cool anymore. The fact that most people
| are actually socializing on discord and not inside the
| games themselves really diminishes the social moat as
| well.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Roblox has had a pretty incredible run, though. They've
| been doing the same thing since 2004, and they've been
| extremely popular amongst their target demographic for
| most of that. They've clearly found a market niche that's
| hard to displace.
|
| And that's not by leaning too heavily on existing
| players, either. They've got a a pretty continuous in/out
| flow of kids entering and leaving their target
| demographic as players, and who I can only assume are
| mostly bored college students as content developers.
|
| They've continuously updated their engine to keep up with
| modern trends (dynamic lighting, VR, mobile), while most
| importantly keeping the entire system simple enough that
| a child can pick it up, tinker around with it, and very
| quickly see real results. As player expectations from
| standalone games have climbed over the years, there's a
| serious pipeline issue getting from "bored kid who has a
| knack for tinkering" to "I've built a game, come play
| it". Roblox addresses this by managing expectations. No
| one demands high-quality textures and models in a Roblox
| game, it's a Roblox game. A certain degree of buginess
| isn't just tolerated, it's expected. Because it's a
| Roblox game. They've struck a balance between a basement
| skill floor and sky's the limit ceiling in utilizing
| their tooling that most companies could only dream about.
|
| In short, Roblox is a damn impressive company, that under
| no circumstances should be discounted just because they
| nearly exclusively target the "Kid's old enough to
| (perhaps inadvisably) be left unattended with a computer"
| demographic.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Does Roblox have a main game, or is it just an editor
| with some custom content. Seems more analogous to the
| Warcraft III World Editor that Warcraft III.
| TingPing wrote:
| I believe they have first-party and community content.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| All games are created by external developers.
|
| Roblox is more akin to Unity combined with a publishing
| platform.
| [deleted]
| mixedbit wrote:
| I 100% agree, yet while the investors were buying this vision
| in November, just to give up a few months later amazes me.
| With the 2000 internet bubble there was at least enough time
| to see the overpriced businesses doing poorly, here the
| bubble popped before anything had a chance to be delivered
| and market tested.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Both bubbles largely ended via Fed tightening. When
| inflation runs hot, the speculative sectors get damaged the
| most via tighter monetary policy.
|
| It just happened to be that metaverse as a concept took off
| near the end of this cycle.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| > Unity . . . does not have additional revenue streams outside
| its engine licensing business and other related software products
|
| I don't believe this is true, AFAIK the majority of their revenue
| comes from their in-game advertising business, not from licensing
| the engine.
| amitmathew wrote:
| Slightly dated, but from their 2020 annual report:
| https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files/doc_financials/2020/q4...
|
| - 30% of revenue from Create Solutions (ie engine licensing) -
| 61% of revenue from Operate Solutions (ad platform, IAP,
| multiplayer, build server, VOIP, CDN, analytics) - 9% from
| strategic partnerships
|
| Although they are known for catering to the indie developer
| crowd, a bulk of their revenue is from a relatively small
| number of companies (~120).
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Wouldn't that along with marketplace assets (as mentioned by
| another comment) fall under "other related software products"
| since those are used within the game engine?
| 60654 wrote:
| That is correct, about 2/3rds comes from "operations" (mostly
| ads, also some hosting services, etc)
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270474/unity-software-r...
| marcodiego wrote:
| > the majority of their revenue comes from their in-game
| advertising business
|
| So, they can open still open source it? I mean, open sourcing
| it would allow competitor to use the same code, but given it is
| not the same brand and not possible to release to consoles or
| stores, they could still keep most of their revenue, right?
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| They don't even need to go full FOSS, they can just opt for
| source-availability to be a bit more competitive with Unreal
| Engine.
|
| One of the things devs like about Unreal is that the entire
| codebase is just there to look at, so you can debug any bugs
| yourself and even add features to the engine that you
| specifically need for your game. Meanwhile Unity is a black-
| box blob that you can't neither debug or extend, and all you
| can do is yelp in the bug tracker or the forums to get
| unnoticed.
| danschuller wrote:
| The C# code is open for read access here:
| https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference
| [deleted]
| christkv wrote:
| And cut on assets from their store I imagine ?
| Gaessaki wrote:
| Not to mention their hosting services from the Multiplay
| division. Though I guess that could be swept under "related
| software products."
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Are those ever used for games not using their engine?
| starburst wrote:
| Absolutely it's a populars ads network for mobile games and
| can be used without the unity engine
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Is it common though? I'm wondering if maybe they just
| consider it to be a "related product" because 99.9% of the
| customers are Unity engine users.
|
| I don't know any actual numbers
| starburst wrote:
| Yes any mobile games (be it made by unity or other
| engine) that display ads most probably have unity ads in
| their waterfall it is very popular
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| Duolingo uses it for their in app ads.
| saos wrote:
| They doubled their workforce since going public in 2020? Insane
| gernb wrote:
| Niantic also announced layoffs
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-29/pokemon-g...
| throwaway345098 wrote:
| Throwaway account for reasons that will become obvious.
|
| I know someone who was able to work with JR at EA at a very high
| level, and who was familiar with internal goings-on at Unity a
| few years ago. His assessment of JR's leadership style was that
| he thought competition between executives was a good thing, and
| the result was a lot of mistrust and chaos.
|
| I'm not sure the specifics of how this played out at EA, but what
| I do know is that during his tenure, there were a number of
| poorly-executed moves towards expanding franchises (Dead Space 3,
| Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel),
| adding live service components to games that didn't benefit
| (SimCity), pivots to free-to-play that failed (Plants Vs Zombies
| 2, Bejeweled Skies, Dungeon Keeper), rushed releases meant to
| fill schedules (Dragon Age 2), and several massive acquisitions
| at hugely inflated prices that were almost total wastes of money
| (Playfish, PopCap).
|
| There were many internal groups battling for control: Multiple
| product management teams who wanted to influence monetization
| strategy across mobile games, several small studios who were able
| to release games with little to no oversight (an HTML5/JS web
| game team that made a Command and Conquer game, and another team
| that made several Dragon Age Flash games), and the ill-fated
| initiative to turn BioWare into a huge umbrella label that lasted
| about a year before SWTOR came out and then Ray and Greg were
| basically forced into retirement.
|
| Lots of really messy stuff.
|
| From the folks I've talked to who work at Unity, it's pretty
| chaotic there too. And why wouldn't it be? They doubled headcount
| in a short period of time, are tackling a ton of different
| markets, they've pushed and then deprecated or removed support
| for a multiplayer solution, analytics service, a UI rewrite, and
| probably more I'm forgetting. Then there are the "this is the new
| hotness" features that STILL AREN'T FINISHED even two, three,
| four, or more years after they were announced, like the two
| competing and incompatible rendering pipelines, ECS, and more.
| And I've been told that the reason that longstanding bugs in
| major features like 2D sprites and physics take so long to be
| fixed is that each of those major features only has one, maybe
| two people working on it.
|
| No wonder things are rocky at Unity.
| syspec wrote:
| I believe all of that, but at the same time ask anyone who
| works anywhere...
|
| It's always a shit show from the inside...
| imchillyb wrote:
| > Unity's business is split into Operate Solutions (consisting of
| Unity Ads, Unity In-App Purchases, and other tools, which was
| newly established in 2015), Create Solutions (consisting of Unity
| Engine subscriptions and other professional services) and
| Strategic Partnerships. In 2019, of its reported revenue Operate
| Solutions accounted for 54%, Create Solutions for 31% and the
| remaining income sources for 15%.
|
| ...
|
| > On 5 June 2019, Anne Evans, formerly vice-president in human
| resources for Unity Technologies, filed a sexual harassment and
| wrongful termination lawsuit against the company, alleging that
| she had been harassed by Riccitiello and another co-worker, and
| was then terminated over the dispute with the latter. Evans said
| that the company had a "highly sexualised" workplace culture,
| where executives would routinely discuss their sexual histories.
| Unity Technologies responded that Evans had been terminated due
| to misconduct and lapse in judgment, and replaced Evans with a
| former Microsoft executive in mid-2020.
|
| Wanna bet whether more whistle blowers are in that layoff mix?
|
| Unity Engine only accounts for 30% of total revenue.
|
| So why did the CEO lie about income?
|
| Why the layoffs?
|
| Wanna bet?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| As alarming as it is to see seemingly well-positioned large
| public companies do this... have any of the layoffs been at
| profitable companies? Netflix?
| Wesxdz wrote:
| I am starting a bcorp to develop a visual metaprogramming
| interface for generating ecs code if any Unity engineers laid off
| are interested in being a potential cofounder you can message me
| on Discord Wesxdz#1518 :)
|
| edit: link if curious (http://paphos.one)
| jimmywetnips wrote:
| Whoa I'm sold. Sent you a pm
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| When it was the crypto industry laying off employees, I saw a
| giant wave of responses of screeching, laughing and lots of
| schadenfreude. But when it is the wider tech industry, now it is
| _' X is hard'_ or _' oh dear'_ and _' this is not looking good'_.
|
| The age of free, cheap dump money being thrown around has come to
| an end with multiple companies still not making any money, with
| unsustainable amounts of head count now shedding employees. But
| this comes as to no surprise anyway.
|
| Unless the head count is low and is making tons of money like
| Binance, FTX, Kraken or the company is insanely profitable in all
| directions like Google, Apple and Microsoft, then you are
| certainly going to survive.
|
| Companies like Netflix, Clubhouse, etc on the other hand are
| going to struggle in the long run.
|
| EDIT: I guess the tech bros at unprofitable startups are upset
| and can't begin to refute the hard brutal truth in my comment.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Well, now I feel better about my job application getting
| declined.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Earlier discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31925823
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't understand Unity's appeal at all, and I only understand
| Unreal Engine's appeal because of their integration now with
| Quixel and some other IP among other factors. Otherwise it is
| barely an engine that makes me feel productive.
|
| Unity does basically nothing for you, and Unreal Engine barely
| did anything at all for you until recently with some advancements
| in UE 5.0.
|
| > "The engine itself is a lot more bare basics than I thought it
| was. For some reason I was under the impression that it was kind
| of like Source, in as much that it had the main menu, server
| joining, all the basic deathmatch stuff built in. But it's a lot
| closer to Unity than that. It has barely anything, and you add
| the rest. No main menu system, no player weapon system, no health
| + dying system. This kind of took me by surprise at first, but I
| can see why it makes sense."[1]
|
| [1]: https://garry.blog/unreal-engine/
| lmeyerov wrote:
| If directly/indirectly impacted folks are reading, we are looking
| for a js webgl dev as part of the next 10X+ rev of our end-to-end
| GPU data viz engine (client+server), both contract / full-time,
| and remote-friendly: build@graphistry
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