Mastodawn

woelkchen Sep 15, 2023

They turned off ads? Great. Can that be a standoff that lasts forever?

vlad Sep 15, 2023

I bet it’ll last less time then the reddit standoff. But I do wish them all of the luck. Fuck Unity and their bullshit fees.

But hey, at least they didn’t give it a set end date; from the very start of their “strike” the reddit mods couldn’t stay away from their unpaid powertrips and leave their octogenerian mothers’ basements for more than 2 days, and instantly folded at a single empty threat to take away the only thing in their lives that gives them purpose and makes them feel like they wield power over others.

Chariotwheel Sep 15, 2023

Don't shove us all under the same rug. I packed my bags, shred my old comments and posts and went into the Fediverse.

You were the exception not the rule

DaGeek247 Sep 15, 2023

Nope. Content creators, the ones doing all the talking on reddit, definitely left. Check out this graph of posts per day on r/askreddit

Sorry for the triple post, lag got me

be_excellent_to_each_other Sep 15, 2023

From what I've heard, a lot of it is bot posts now. So if you subtract out the bots I wonder if that delta gets even bigger.

zecg Sep 18, 2023

Don’t shove us all under the same rug. I packed my bags, shred my old comments and posts and went into the Fediverse.

There’s dozens of us. DOZENS!

sibachian Sep 15, 2023

eh? do people still use reddit even? last i heard they have employees actively create threads now to try and keep engagement going.

Now it’s down to just the low-effort memes, ”religious people bad” circlejerks, unhelpful advice, and edgy 14 year olds who just discovered politics, think homophobia and fragile masculinity are “based”, and think communism is when you hate your home country because something something pronouns, know 2 russian words (both obscenities), have been playing too many WW2-themed games and say comrade every 4 seconds.

CaptainAniki Sep 15, 2023

Don’t forget that same 14 year old will call you a tankie if you disagree with them in the slightest bit and then you’ll get downvote bombed because you went against the hive-mind of “coddle everyone!”

Despite usually being one himself

JBloodthorn Sep 15, 2023

Don't forget the 4+ "rate me" subs that started hitting the front page every day.

Ah yes, the horny college kids with too much free time

Ah yes, the horny college kids with too much free time

Ah yes, the horny college kids and divorcees over 50 with too much free time

Rentlar Sep 15, 2023

Reddit employees searching TikTok for memes to repost to Reddit be like:

psud Sep 16, 2023

There are some special interest subreddits still running almost like before. Subs with a population of a few thousand, with the active members using names that pertain to the sub

Those haven’t moved, at least the non-techie ones haven’t

drcobaltjedi Sep 15, 2023

Hey some if said we’d go on indefinately and after being told to open decided to maliously comply only. /r/baduibattles a sub I started is now only letting posts be of New reddit or the Reddit app. User involvement has plummeted, there are fewer posts, each with votes and comments. Automod also posts telling people to join us at @[email protected]

alignedchaos Sep 15, 2023

Written like someone who wasn’t actually paying attention to the subreddits during that time

vlad Sep 15, 2023

That’s true. Although, having that limit probably got more of them to participate. So while the impact was short, it was more noticeable.

ShranTheWaterPoloFan Sep 15, 2023

I’m confused about what you want.

Mods literally got replaced by reddit because they refused to capitulate.

I’m not a fan of reddits choices, but if I was deeply involved in a community I’d consider staying to be part of that community still.

Zeth0s Sep 15, 2023

With the difference there are money on the table this time

Epicurus0319 Sep 16, 2023

And they know precisely what’s at stake, and that in any case continuing to use an engine now run by dangerous morons intent on destroying it for a quick buck will not be an option, as we all know Unity will strive for its stated goal of screwing them over like this, be it suddenly and shamelessly like they’re hoping to do or by slowly boiling the frog over many years. And then those devs would lose everything.

The devs can’t afford to fold. The other forum’s powermods folded because they not only could’ve afforded to, but also because upon realizing just how expendable they were, they didn’t want to risk losing the source of their god complex. That, and given that site’s users’ history of [youtu.be/hi14dP5Rdm0?si=tS_PWBxklvxoAsM0](bringing feathers to knife fights) their failure to enact the change they wanted was hardly surprising.

Laziness is a Virtue

YouTube

chameleon Sep 15, 2023

I think this one will work. Most of these games are already "multihomed" on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren't that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.

And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you're going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.

driving_crooner Sep 15, 2023

I haven’t play games with ads in years, but O remember getting a lot of Christian ads, like Bible verses and such. It was even worse that regular buy shit ads imo.

Lemminary Sep 16, 2023

I wanted to add a scathing remark about “shoving your in our pious face!” but it practically writes itself.

jarfil Sep 15, 2023

ouroboros

Nice word for “circlejerk”…

cutting off a huge portion in the middle

…but this imagery is disturbing.

chameleon Sep 15, 2023

Yeah on second thought it's maybe a bit more vivid than intended, but it fits what I think is going to happen. Below the top 1-2% of mobile games, it's one big pile of endlessly recycled advertising money. Spend a million in ads, make $800k in ads and $500k in microtransactions, and the $300k is where you have to pay everything else from. Unity is about to bite into that hard and doesn't care if it leaves behind some wounds.

OrnatePotato Sep 15, 2023

Hence, ouroboros.

hoshikarakitaridia Sep 15, 2023

I hope unity’s shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let’s makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.

It becomes more appearent with every new instance of protest that there’s something equally valuable for a company as money, and that is community trust. Because losing it can stop growth. I love the new layer of accountability we obtained with the internet.

expected_crayon Sep 15, 2023

The problem is a lot of executive compensation packages are based on short term growth rather than long term growth. So CEOs are incentivized to maximize profits today at the expense of tomorrow so they can get that sweet sweet bonus money. It’s a fundamental flaw with our entire economic system that I don’t think is likely to fix itself.

Pennomi Sep 15, 2023

Well looks like even short term profits are being threatened. Good.

Honytawk Sep 16, 2023

I think they believe that they can use the increased profit of today to fix the losses of tomorrow.

But trust in general comes by foot and goed on horseback, and that is especially true with communities.

half_built_pyramids Sep 15, 2023

Shareholders aren’t humans with ethics or a conscience. Remember when bby koty was in the news for sex harass? Bliz stuck went down. War Bufet bought bliz stucks and then when the new cycle moved on bliz stuck rebound and war buf MADE FUCKING MONEY OFF OFF A SEX HARASS.

And then there was a news cycle about how smet war buf is.

There is no accountability. There is only money.

RagnarokOnline Sep 15, 2023

This was a tough read for me. Is this what it feels like to be dyslexic?

roguetrick Sep 15, 2023

War Bufet.

half_built_pyramids Sep 15, 2023

Yes

forrgott Sep 15, 2023

Dude, this isn’t Twitter, I mean xitter (pronounce x as sh); use your big boy words.

honey_im_meat_grinding Sep 15, 2023

I don’t think that’s going to happen as long as the ownership structures surrounding shareholders remains the same. It’s not the average person who invests in Unity that’s doing this, it’s the wealthy equity firms with significant holdings that are pushing for this unsustainable behaviour. After the 2008 crash, the EU, the US, Canada, and the UK all did studies on the economic stability of coops (1-person-1-vote democratically owned businesses) versus traditional companies and found that the coops were considerably more sustainable:

The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 percent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2011.

(UK) A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.

(US) Credit unions, a type of cooperative bank, had five times lower failure rate than other banks during the financial crisis and more than doubled lending to small businesses between 2008 and 2016, from $30 billion to $60 billion, while lending to small businesses overall during the same period declined by around $100 billion.

A 2010 report by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export in Québec found the five-year survival rate and ten-year survival rate of cooperatives in Québec to be 62% and 44% respectively compared to 35% and 20% for conventional firms.

There’s also a study using 100 years of data on French wine coops vs non-coop wine companies showing similar results: not only do coops survive longer, the survival rate gap widens over time as more and more non-coops collapse [Cooperatives versus Corporations: Survival in the French Wine Industry. Journal of Wine Economics, 13(3), 328-354. doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.1]

DeadPand Sep 15, 2023

Better off just cutting ties and moving on, true colors don’t really change

echo64 Sep 15, 2023

‘cutting ties and moving on’ would require a total rebuild of their games in a new engine. it doesn’t really work that way.

They’re going to try this bullshit again, or in another manner. Maybe having everything centralized onto a proprietary single point of failure isn’t a great idea.

Cutting ties and moving on is the right answer.

StarServal Sep 15, 2023

“Oops, we ratcheted up the heat too fast. We’ll need to do it again slower.”

echo64 Sep 15, 2023

No one wants this situation, but the reality is that you can not switch from one engine to another engine without rebuilding the product. This is true for every game development company on the planet, this is how the industry is.

we can sit and laugh at that and call them stupid for building an entire multi-billion dollar industry on this, or we can understand the realities of the whole thing.

The reality is they’ve shown their hand.

Why anyone would continue to do business with them is insane to me. You’re setting yourself up for future failure.

echo64 Sep 15, 2023

Why anyone would continue to do business with them is insane to me.

you have a mature stack built entirely on the engine, that stacks the only thing that powers your companies revenue, if that stack did not exist then you would fold quickly

you probably have an entire company of experts in this engine, an deep knowledge-base that you are throwing away if you move away, your ability to have speed and agility is likely crippled until you get up to speed anywhere else. good luck affording to pay for that monumental shift in your company. 3, almost all the talent in the industry (at your level) is on unity engine, good luck hiring for $obscure_engine

basically, it’s incredibly naive to just say “just switch, obviously they are bad, they will be bad in the future too so switch”. it shows deep ignorance. it’s worth trying to understand the situation before saying any of this stuff.

I’m saying that whole production concept is flawed. You’re at the mercy of a single company. You don’t need to explain it further than that. You’ve centralized and specialized too much. It’s naive to assume they aren’t going to squeeze developers again.

Good luck to those who stay on Unity, you’re going to have a similar issue later down the line until they wear you out.

Elderos Sep 15, 2023

That is just reductionism. The post above yours went above and beyond to explain why they can’t just change the engine. For a lot of business it would mean bankruptcy now. So you understand that given the choice between bankruptcy now or maybe being squeezed again by Unity later, the latter is still more an attractive option, right?

Hiccup Sep 15, 2023

Lose your business now or lose it later, what’s the difference? Unity is basically behaving like the mafia. The installation fee is protection money. Fuck 'em.

Elderos Sep 15, 2023

Calm down. It is a shit move and a break of trust but very, very few business will be bankrupted by those actual fees. You guys here are outraged but you have no stake in this, it is easy to claim that you’d burn your company to the ground to get rid of Unity, but there is a reason why only the rich indies are going to ditch Unity short-term.

They’ve got you perfectly situated for exploitation. You’re rationalizing sticking with an abusive partner.

Elderos Sep 15, 2023

So better go bankrupt and lose your business and everything you built right now without trying, right? How pragmatic.

That’s a false dichotomy, but it’s good for coping with your abusive relationship.

Hiccup Sep 15, 2023

This isn’t a normal scenario/ situation. This is an all hands on deck emergency, worst case situation. You cannot continue with unity under any circumstances. This is a pivot moment with unity endangering your whole existence, as well as showing their obsolescence. Anybody that sticks with unity now is setting themselves up for failure. This installation charge isn’t just bad for developers/ businesses, but consumers as well and consumers will need to avoid unity games. Unless you’re a dev or really into gaming, most people probably couldn’t even tell you what a game engine is or what their favorite games’ are built in. This will now force them to be conscience of unity games and to avoid them.

tvbusy Sep 15, 2023

The fact that it’s impossible to change game on an ongoing/completed game is exactly the reason why everyone is angry. This is distortion, simple, just like the example of car being charged for miles mentioned in the article. It’s no coincidence that games are advertised as “built on …” since game engine decides how the game is built.

Buddahriffic Sep 15, 2023

I think the word you’re looking for is “extortion”.

Honytawk Sep 16, 2023

The thing is that switching engines isn’t impossible, it is just an extreme amount of work.

The sad reality is that sometimes projects aren’t meant to last, most don’t even reach fruition. And I know it can be a hard pill to swallow, but it is sometimes necessary to rebuild an entire project, or drop it completely.

Whether that necessity is valid depends entirely on the developer.