Unity's Self-Combustion Engine

&gt; Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in doing that because it&#x27;s very hard for a sustainable business to compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars.<p>This right here is the most notable part of the article, and it is entirely correct - it has been <i>for years</i>. Venture capital is fine to use for actual ventures, to create new markets or hell, to break into a market with entrenched powers... but when it is used on a long time purely to undercut and destroy legitimate prior businesses (taxis&#x2F;Uber, hotels&#x2F;AirBnB, game engines&#x2F;Unity), authorities should step in.<p>It&#x27;s time to revive anti-trust, anti-dumping and other anti-predatory politics.

Because of ZIRP, there&#x27;s an entire generation of business leaders that have mastered raising money but have no idea how to make it. Expect to see many more own goals like this in the next few years as they try to figure out how.

Let the wars begin:<p>- Unity itself can hire dark botnets to beef up their profits at any time<p>- game developers need to start selling with the caveat &quot;5 re-installs included&quot; and of course you change the price to over-sell how many installs the average person does<p>- game developers are now incentivized to make huge huge huge game downloads for no good reason other than to make people think twice about uninstalling and reinstalling later since it takes so long<p>- steam and game distribution platforms now need to start limiting re-installs and downloads for everyone, more complexity, more hassle, more bugs<p>- everyone needs to start running whitelist firewalls again, since automatic private data exfiltration is getting so out of control we need to block all internet access by default now

2023 has really been the year of established companies self-immolating in the name of more money. Is this the result of some new business strategy being pushed to high level execs? Or has the idiocracy produced by failing upwards finally come home to roost?

I think it would make more sense to take a cut of the revenue when a game is sold, as that is easier to calculate for the developers. I can understand why they chose installs though as that&#x27;s easier to measure for them and they would need to trust developers with their revenue numbers as they don&#x27;t own the distribution platform like e.g. Apple does, but honestly they could&#x27;ve just used the installation rate as a sanity check for the license numbers reported by developers.<p>As a game developer I would be very wary about signing such a contract as I&#x27;m sure these metrics can be easily gamed, so anyone with enough malicious intent could probably install-bomb my game and rack up large charges for me, and in the end I would be responsible for proving that those installs were malicious (which I imagine could be quite difficult).

How long until someone weaponises the &#x27;installs&#x27; to bankrupt competitors? I can see this happening in the already somewhat scummy free-to-play market.

There&#x27;s really no way for them to recover the lost trust. Even if they backtrack everything the mistrust will be there. The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine.

No one has mentioned Apple yet. Unity is Apple&#x27;s exclusive partner on Vision Pro (for now at least). I can&#x27;t see Apple being especially thrilled with this.

I make WebGL multiplayer games using Unity.<p>The original changes essentially shut me down.<p>Yesterday, I just found out Unity has changed their definition to exempt WebGL games: a partial relief. I have little confidence Unity will stick to their plans.<p>In between I evaluated all the alternatives to Unity specifically about WebGL players.<p>unfortunately WebGL is either impossible or crippled in other engines, frameworks. Further, other engines are like MS Paint versus Unity who would be Adobe Creative Cloud.<p>Here is my WebGL summary:<p>Godot uses Node trees instead of Entity Component. Porting Unity scripts almost impossible because of this amongst other reasons. Attempts to weld Entity Component only supported on Godot 4 but….<p>Godot 4+ WebGL does not work on Mac with no plans to change. Godot is waiting for Chrome to fix something, no comment on Safari, FF, others. One forum poster doing Godot WebGL export noticed that the Empty Scene WebGL export of Godot is 17MB versus 4MB for Unity.<p>Unreal 5 does not export to WebGL. However you can use UE 4<p>UE4 WebGL is not much discussed and the pieces you can find imply the output size, and thus customer download time, is significantly larger than Unity’s<p>Stride does not export to WebGL.<p>So UE4 seemed the only other option

No, the problem isn’t trust. The problem is the pricing model is both bad and retroactively applied. Given a good number of games won’t be modified or updated, just sold over time, I struggle to see a justification for applying to them beyond “we want more money.”

&gt; &quot;We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won&#x27;t go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the Runtime is distributed for a given project.&quot;<p>This is incredible. They&#x27;ve given themselves the right to demand any amount of money as determined by them alone.

&gt; John Riccitiello, now there is a guy who is going to attract and retain top management and engineering talent!<p>The Unity board apparently. The stuff that comes out of this guys mouth inspires confidence.. In shorting the company. How have they not replaced him ages ago?

&gt; Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers<p>This is, quite literally, pretty much every consumer-facing startup. Uber anyone?<p>As an aside, the very idea of &quot;free markets&quot; is a myth. Markets only function effectively with strong government. Period. Let&#x27;s see how far anyone gets in a libertarian fairy land without courts.<p>ARM&#x27;s IPO valuation is pretty much based on jacking up licensing fees too.<p>We need to get back to the idea that companies are vehicle for generating income without the endless expectation of growth at all costs.

&gt; I see a lot of developers talking about Godot, but I also see developers talking about Linux whenever Microsoft pulls some underhanded shenanigans with Windows and that doesn&#x27;t seem to have cracked the OS market wide open<p>This is not even close to a fair comparison.

<i>&gt; $2.6 billion – Unity&#x27;s lifetime accumulated deficit over 19 years of operations, a figure we got by combining the $2.2 billion lifetime debt of its last annual report with the $447 million in net losses it reported for the first two quarters of its current fiscal year.</i><p>Anyone know how a start up company can possibly finance such a gigantic debt?

<i>&gt; ...but companies don&#x27;t exist to grow market share. They exist to earn money.</i><p>This is not what HN&#x2F;YC &quot;taught&quot; me...

It does as much sense as sites with &quot;Do you want to enable browser notifications?&quot; popups. No sense, sites still do it, regardless of what there users press.

I think their actual strategy is to cut deals with vulnerable devs. They are waving a gun around and seeing who flinches.