this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they're not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don't like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they're in a focus group. It's not an actual representative sample of the public.
I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do
Jagex has supposedly been barely successful forever tho, unity takes in billions by being shitters. In the end that’s all some companies care about
Unity hasn't been profitable ever. Jagex is marginally profitable.
Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
That's the problem - based on the CEO selling almost all his stock over time and rumors attributed to employees, they knew.
A company turning a consistent modest profit is good for many people, but makes no one rich. It's a good investment and provides for many people, but is meaningless if you're already rich.
A company exploding to 100x its size makes a bunch of people very rich and a lot of people more wealthy, but is very rare in this age where the world is already as industrialized as anyone wants it to be. There's nowhere else to expand, no underdeveloped countries with resources to buy for pennies on the dollar
A company imploding can make a few people rich... but it's a big guaranteed payout if you see it coming.
That's the stage of capitalism we've been at for a while - cannibalization.
I'm sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you've already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don't think people really considered that as a possibility before.
I feel like it's pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It's not that they didn't know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn't realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.
This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn't have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.
Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there's costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.
So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.
My hypothesis anyway.