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Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle

Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

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  • For the best. Companies need to learn to tread carefully when dealing with customers, they can't be allowed to get off lightly for trying anti-consumer practices like this.

    • Actually the reason this didn't work out is because they are in the B2B, not business to consumer business.

      • Turns out other businesses aren't fond of being asked to pay a dollar to reload, who knew?

        They keep walking back further and their stock prices just keep plummeting. I would like to say I hope the CEO, who is the former CEO of EA, for any who aren't aware, gets fired for this. But we all know that no matter how hard he messes up, some other business will pay him millions in incentives to pick him up.

        • It's not like getting fired as a CEO is a negative. They leave with a golden parachute and get hired elsewhere

        • In another thread someone said the board is made up of assholes, so don't get your hopes up for any positive changes...

          I tried to do some googling, but googling and sourcing out the history of each board member is cumbersome. So instead I will just post this snippet from a reddit post by u/Xijit

          I apologize in advance for the length.

          "Yes, John is undoubtedly an asshole, since they don't let you be a CEO unless you are one. But he has also been the CEO of Unity since 2014 and oversaw its progress from "that engine that lets you port your game to anything" to "the platform that every single mobile game is made on and the backbone of the inde developer market." The main reason why so many of you are only hearing about him being the CEO now, is because he HAD (past tense) been doing a relatively good job.

          What changed ... In 2020 Unity went public, and a bunch of shit heads bought their way onto Unity's board of directors. Ultimately the CEO works for the Board, so when these new bosses tell him to do something self destructive, he does it.

          Here are the names you should be talking about instead of John:

          Tomer Bar Zeev

          Roelof Botha

          Egon Durban.

          (Edit: I forgot to say that they are Board members)

          Remember IronSource, that dog shit monetization company that absolutely everyone in the industry dumped, and was circling the drain until Unity bought them for $4.4 billion? Tomer Bar Zeev is the founder of IronSource, and following the merger he became Unity's 3rd president (along with John and Marc) ... yes, this is the asshole who sold a package of malware under the guise of monetization software & ultimately is the root cause of this install tax. Given IronSource's history of malware, I feel that it is safe to say that the Unity runtime will likely start getting flagged by antivirus programs and casually request admin rights during installation.

          How Unity got infected with IronSource, is that Sequoia Capitol and Silver lake pledged to invest $1 billion into Unity if the deal went through. Frankly, the math doesn't add up for Unity to trade $4.4 billion to buy a plague blanket of a company, only to receive $1 billion in return. Especially when a rival mobile monetization company offered to pay Unity $17 billion if they called off the IronSource deal & merge with them instead. Unless that $1b was for the sake of C-suite bonuses, in which case all of this makes perfect sense.

          But who the Hell is Roelof Botha & Egon Durban, and why are they important names? Roelof is a Director of Sequoia, Egon is the founder of Silver Lake, and both of them have ties back to Elon Musk ... which is pretty obvious for how fast Unity has caught on fire.

          If Egon's name is familiar, it is because he was on Twitter's Board and was the one who pushed to have them accept the deal, & then got thrown off the board when they realised that he was just spying for Elon during the resulting lawsuit. He also was the one who helped Elon with his fake " Taking Tesla private" scam.

          Roelof was the CFO of PayPal before it got acquired and has a long history of being involved with mergers that result in a lot of money for some, but absolute shit deals for end users and employees.

          Looping back to the top ... I think John is done with Unity, but not in the "yay, us consumers have protested hard enough to get him fired" kind of way the internet wants. I think he was done in 2020 when he went from being the guy actually running the company, to the guy who answers to a room full of investment fuck heads (of the 13 board members, 11 are investment managers), and then gets to take the blame for their shit decisions. I feel like the reason why he sold his stock is because he knew this was a shit idea that was going to tank the company, but these assholes wouldn't listen. So he cashed out his stock and will be announcing his retirement at the start of Q4.

          Don't be shocked when Tomer Bar Zeev gets named as his replacement."

          (P.S does anyone know how to quote inline and keep the paragraph spacing?)

          • This is completely unsurprising. Often when a company goes to shit it's the board of directors, ultimately, they control the CEO and the rest of the executive team at a company. I feel horribly for the indie devs that were using Unity, though there's always a chance for this to happen to proprietary software it still sucks when it does happen.

          • The quoting in Lemmy is block quotes, so it appears you'd have to quote each paragraph individually. Definitely inconvenient, I wonder if there's a way they could rework the system.

120 comments