I honestly don’t know if we even can at this point. Internally there are a lot of things going on that have pretty well crushed even the whisperings of unionizing that I used to hear. Things are bleak over here fam. I just need to get through a couple more months of having stable insurance then I’m leaving first chance I get
When you’ve already pissed on your customers, burned the house down, and shot the dog, the only people left using your software are clearly the die-hard masochists. Nothing left to lose.
Genshin Impact still runs on Unity, and MiHoYo is honestly big enough at this point that they could just buy out Unity altogether if the company hurts their bottom line.
You know, if you’d asked me 6 months ago what Unity could do to lose even more goodwill with gamers, I would have said there was nothing, they were at the bottom. The fact that they were able to not only find but also pick literally the worst option on the planet is quite the achievement.
A former EA and Zynga executive? One that specialized in mobile? Jesus Christ.
I imagine the discussions in the board room went something along the lines of “holy shit we’re screwed… Who can we call to cash out something while we still can?”
I’m gonna say going all in on mobile and abandoning everything else to languish. Acting like it’s still 2002 with Angry Birds and Candy Crush being the biggest games on the mobile market. That simple physics and matching block games are a quick turnaround with massive profit potential. Viewing mobile as the beginning of a massive gold rush, ignoring the fact that it was over a decade ago and the easy mobile money is now gone. Ignoring that competition came and saturated that market years ago.
They’ll probably use some sort of justification based on mobile market share, Windows PC usage dropping for many in favor of tablets and phone-only usage. Ignoring the fact that they make a complicated video game engine geared towards complex, demanding, and immersive games, not towards the casual mobile market.
I would have made this same prediction even without the new CEO coming from mobile, so that just compounds the chances of it happening IMO.
I’d go for: some vaporous announcements about “upcoming great changes”, followed by Unity seeking additional investor money, then concluding with a new round of lay-offs just after that.
My bet on what they could do next to lose more goodwill is that they reintroduce the same scheme of charging for installs but with a slight difference that they will insist makes it totally different.
As an indie developer, I began divesting from Unity when Riccitiello pushed Helgason out and took over.
Back then, the predictable changes quickly rolled in: all the features were suddenly free (once, Unity’s business model was to sell their Pro version with additional features), developers were forced into subscription licenses, Unity began gathering investor money, then acquired a micro transaction business, then a telemetry business, then a video ad business…
I assume Bromberg will merely be its second “new economy” CEO and continue to run Unity like Uber, with a hazy revenue model that probably circles around putting Unity into as many mobile shovelware games as possible to siphon money off the ads served via Unity’s ad network and micro transactions flowing through Unity’s micro payments business.
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