Interest rates went up, shareholders asked for returns on their investment and companies are trying to get there in the least amount of time no matter the cost. Even if the cost is total destruction of the trust in their companies. CEOs are stupid like that (as they will just hop to the next company and still get huge bonus after they get replaced).
Is it really that they are stupid, if it works for them and boards keep hiring them after doing so?
Or is it that they and the boards turning a quick profit by bleeding the company dry and fucking over employees and customers alike for their own gain are simply the beneficiaries of an unfair system?
I don’t have statistics to analyze, but I think investors lose more in the long term with these rushed plans to turn up a profit. Basically it hurts the company long term, they suffer a hit when they have to buyout (golden parachute clause) the CEO to fire him/her and it limits the potencial new customers and growth. So these inverstors will stop any future contributions and turn their focus elsewhere which accelerates the companies issue with lack of cash and leads to people firing which leads to other issues until company is done.
The issue with decisions like this is loss of trust. Even if Unity won’t see big loss right now, the studios will look for alternatives from now on. Hiring of new people now focus on different engines experience instead of Unity and over time Unity will be out.
So while they don’t really lose they also don’t really win anything either. If they kept the status quo they would have keep getting income and ability to cash out in the future.
I think the question is rather whether the investors expect / want the company to keep providing profit long term, or whether they just want to shake the price up enough that they can cash out on a high point and leave whatever new sucker is holding the shares now to deal with the fact that they’re turning to dust in his hands. Maybe they expected that the company wouldn’t be too profitable for much longer and figured any short term improvement was going to be as good as it gets.
The Investors are not one monolithic and everlasting hivemind that has to look towards its own future benefit. If they can pull their money out with as much profit as possible, it doesn’t matter if the company falls off a cliff the next day, so long as they got their sweet sweet Payday, which they can then invest into another company to eventually do the same to.
Or maybe they’re simply gambling on the fact that many large customers won’t be able to switch off of their platform so easily and will instead work out long-term arrangements, hoping that it will offset the loss from jettisoning the smaller ones. Industries tend to have a certain inertia, so they wouldn’t be too unreasonable with hoping the bigger ships would rather negotiate a better deal than attempt to shift their entire course.
But they didn’t get any improvement from this annoucement. Stock fell by a few % and even after changes goes live, they will still need to wait at least a few months before first games start reaching their thresholds to start generating that runtime fee revenue. By that time a lot of studios will have had enough time to re-import their games to other engines and fix incompatibilities. Sure enterprise users that paid 5k per year per license might stick around, but that’s not new revenue.
I think it’s really hard and dangerous to make such sweeping predictions ahead of time. I heard people clamour that the Reddit API change would kill Reddit in a single stroke, but so far it’s somehow still running. Likewise, sone have been prophesying the end of Twitter for a while now, but so far that has only happened in the literal sense.
They may still eventually reach the end, but there’s no telling how much money investors may still be able to squeeze from them in the short term. Stock prices aren’t the only indicatoe, and short term drops don’t automatically indicate that theyre a dead end - new investors may still buy into the system.
And as for porting your games to a new engine, depending on the complexity and development progress that is just not feasible for smaller studios. If your devs are specialised in Unity, then retraining, ripping out the entire engine, hooking it up to a new one, verify their understanding of the new one is right, ironing out all the kinks the new engine brought and then proceeding with development may add a lot of delay that smaller developers can’t easily shrug off.
It might be more profitable long term, but unless you have patient and generous investors willing to wait that extra time, short term liquidity will be a consideration. It may well be more feasible to finish development as is, then move on to a new engine for new games.
Hobby game devs or those doing it as a side job may be able to afford the time to switch engines, but a lot probably don’t. Likewise, bigger companies may be able to hire or retrain teams for new engines, but that’s extra overhead and may take time too.
In short: The overall growth may be hamstrung, the decline inevitable, but if investors can squeeze out more in the short term, the mid-to-long term drop in stock value may well be just the cost of doing business. And we don’t really know for sure that it will change things at all in the long term, because business decisions are terribly complex and sometimes hard to predict without extensive insider knowledge of all parties.
I think it’s really hard and dangerous to make such sweeping predictions ahead of time
I agree with hard. It’s purely based on my understanding on economics and public statements from companies I seen.
I heard people clamour that the Reddit API change would kill Reddit in a single stroke, but so far it’s somehow still running.
That idea died the minute the blackout ended. It was clear that the changes affected minority users and majority could’t care less that moderating would become harder and all thw other quality of life stuff be lost. Majorify of the internet still consumes ads.
Likewise, sone have been prophesying the end of Twitter for a while now, but so far that has only happened in the literal sense.
It kind of did. Like the people I follow from infosec or science all transitioned to alternative platforms. The only 3 active areas on Twitter are politics, entertainment and porn. So while platform still operates it’s usefulness is limited.
Stock prices aren’t the only indicatoe, and short term drops don’t automatically indicate that theyre a dead end - new investors may still buy into the system.
Sure, but without a clear plan on user growth that is very unlikely. It would be different if they were a monopoly, but alternative engines exists and they offer better deals. They lost their main “selling” point of being free and without royalties.
And as for porting your games to a new engine, depending on the complexity and development progress that is just not feasible for smaller studios. If your devs are specialised in Unity, then retraining, ripping out the entire engine, hooking it up to a new one, verify their understanding of the new one is right, ironing out all the kinks the new engine brought and then proceeding with development may add a lot of delay that smaller developers can’t easily shrug off.
I agree with new projects, but porting your existing games to the new engine is the real goal. So that you can get revenue again without possibility of going bankrupt or in debt and then start transitioning to the new engine.
In short: The overall growth may be hamstrung, the decline inevitable, but if investors can squeeze out more in the short term, the mid-to-long term drop in stock value may well be just the cost of doing business. And we don’t really know for sure that it will change things at all in the long term, because business decisions are terribly complex and sometimes hard to predict without extensive insider knowledge of all parties.
I disagree as there is nothing to squeeze. Hobby devs are unlikely to reach the thresholds, small studios who are the most affected, will be forced to remove their games or risk going bankrupt or in debt and enterprise users are not really affected as they can afford 5k per year per liecense already.
Of course it’s always possible some close door deals will be made with existing users and changes will only apply to new users. Which really should have been the original announcement.
I’d like to clairfy that I generally agree with your assessment. My entire set of responses is an attempt at dialectically challenging and refining that understanding by considering alternate possibilities. I personally feel that nuanced examination of issues is an important critical thinking skill.
I agree with hard. It’s purely based on my understanding on economics and public statements from companies I seen.
Public statements can be a lot of hot air too. We’re operating with a lot of unknowns here, because obviously not every company wants to immediately play with open cards and threatening to leave for the competition is a rather popular negotiation tool.
That idea [of Reddit dying] died the minute the blackout ended. It was clear that the changes affected minority users and majority could’t care less that moderating would become harder and all thw other quality of life stuff be lost. Majorify of the internet still consumes ads.
I fear the same may eventually be true for the ongoing boycotts of Unity. Ultimately, the companies with existing Unity products still need cash flow, no matter the long term repercussions of breaking strike.
[Regardint the end of Twitter:] It kind of did. Like the people I follow from infosec or science all transitioned to alternative platforms. The only 3 active areas on Twitter are politics, entertainment and porn. So while platform still operates it’s usefulness is limited.
Were those infosec / science microbloggers the majority? Did their followers all transition along? Otherwise we’re back to the aforementioned minority issue.
I recently chatted with someone who remarked that their engagement hadn’t taken much of a noticeable hit, and since their favourite people were also still there, there was little incentive to leave either.
These two are a specific issue of community cohesion, however, and the observation probably doesn’t apply to the Unity customer base. I simply tried to illustrate how predicting the death of something isn’t always as easy (a point I find we agree on).
[Regarding investors buying in:] Sure, but without a clear plan on user growth that is very unlikely. It would be different if they were a monopoly, but alternative engines exists and they offer better deals. They lost their main “selling” point of being free and without royalties.
That is a valid point. Professional investors probably will see the writing on the wall, and private ones may not have enough buying power to make a significant difference here if they don’t (or risk it anyway, since the stock thing seems to be a form of gambling for certain people I know).
[Regarding the difficulty of porting games to different engines:] I agree with new projects, but porting your existing games to the new engine is the real goal. So that you can get revenue again without possibility of going bankrupt or in debt and then start transitioning to the new engine.
Assuming you can pull it off in time or have the financial leeway to bear the hit for long enough, absolutely. My point, taken from acquaintances working in the industry, is that such a port isn’t always trivial. Engines tend to have their unique quirks that you eventually learn to work around, and a direct 1:1 translation isn’t always possible. As soon as you come across anything that isn’t a straight replacement, you risk (re-)introducing bugs and problems.
That said, such an existing game may be the perfect live example to learn from, and with the right communication strategy I imagine it may be possible to placate eventual frustration at such issues.
On the other hand, the selling point you mentioned (free and without royalties) may have an impact on the financial calculations of the game, and switching to a different (potentially not-free) engine may throw off those calculations. My knowledge here is limited to class I took some years ago on the topic, but things like running costs obviously get factored into the minimum viable price of a given product.
[Regarding the avility to squeeze money from the product:] [S]mall studios who are the most affected, will be forced to remove their games or risk going bankrupt or in debt
Without sufficient financial backing, they might not be able to afford removing their games either. Choosing between assured bankruptcy by taking down all your revenue and the possibility of retaining at least some revenue to tide you over until you’ve had time to port your games or publish new moneymakers, they might elect to “try to make it”, spurred by hustle culture.
Particularly if the game or studio is a passion project for them, they have an emotional bias that may cloud their judgement to swallow the bitter pill and risk bankruptcy and debt rather than giving up, and up until they’re actually bankrupt, there is at least a little to squeeze still.
Of course it’s always possible some close door deals will be made with existing users and changes will only apply to new users. Which really should have been the original announcement.
On the other hand, they may be pursuing the strategy of announcing drastic changes, then yielding to public pressure and agreeing to a more reasonable solution. Sure, in the short term trust will be hurt, but with today’s news culture, there’s no guarantee the whole affair won’t be swept under the rug and forgotten by the majority in a few weeks.
All that said: Yes, it probably spells doom for smaller customers. Either they to jump ship before it sinks, or they may be forced to choose between drowning and paying extortionate fees for lifeboats. But if they weren’t the most well-paying customers so far, odds are the ones looking to make money won’t miss them anyway.
And sinking the ship to sell it for parts unfortunately isn’t an entirely new phenomenon either.
Nearly every single S&P500 company is majority owned by institutional investors, with 88% of them having one of the Big Three (Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street) as their top investor, and with the only exceptions being Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Oracle, Walmart, Comcast and Kraft-Heinz where insiders are still the top shareholders. The Big Three has 15-20% controlling stakes in nearly every large American corporation, and through the means of coordinated proxy voting, dictates the policies of the board of directors.
These institutional investors are financial capitalists who see the companies as investment vessels, not as industrial capitalists who want to grow their respective industries. They could not care less if the companies go bankrupt as long as they see a return in short term profit. Vanguard, for example, has a deep $7.7 TRILLION assets and do not care at all if some of their businesses go down.
Then you have private equity firms, also known as “corporate raiders”, who raise high stake loans to perform “leveraged buyouts” of established companies. They conduct “financial engineering” i.e. paying themselves dividends, lower wages and force overtime without pay, layoff employees, skirt labor laws, refuse to honor contracts, strip off assets and saddle the companies with debt until these are forced to declare bankruptcy. Then, like true parasites, they ditch the host and jump on to the next companies to suck off their wealth built up over the past century.
You also have venture capitalist (VC) firms that leveraged Obama’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era after 2009 to raise easy capital to profit from tech/software companies. You can read this article about how Andreesen Horowitz perform their operations to destroy software startups:
The thing about these two strategies for VC is that they both can turn a profit. That second one, though, works a little differently than the first. Regardless of whether the company succeeds, pumping its valuation before selling your shares can mean you will make money, even if the business itself doesn’t survive in the long term. But hyping a startup isn’t something a VC can do alone. He needs help. He needs the media.
It happened to Groupon. It happened to Substack. It happened to Imgur. And many others, and it will happen to Reddit and all other software companies in America.
This is by no means only restricted to software companies though, for the rot of finance capitalism had already been sown since Reagan’s and Clinton’s deregulation era that massively expanded Wall Street’s influence, and subsequently fueled most prominently by Obama’s low interest rate monetary policy for them to encroach into every crevices of American industries.
Cisco, used to be the world’s leading telecommunications company, now a shadow of its former self after being financialized by Wall Street.
Boeing, used to be the world’s leading aviation engineering company, now churning out defective products that nearly never happened in its history, after being financialized by Wall Street.
Intel, used to be the world’s semiconductor pioneer, now struggling to keep up with Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, after being financialized by Wall Street.
And this is the fate of America - a financial oligarchy will continue to devour and strip off every remnant of the American industries built up over the past centuries, and there is nothing to stop this in its tracks.
What is it with big companies suddenly shitting on their users?
Interest rates went up, shareholders asked for returns on their investment and companies are trying to get there in the least amount of time no matter the cost. Even if the cost is total destruction of the trust in their companies. CEOs are stupid like that (as they will just hop to the next company and still get huge bonus after they get replaced).
Is it really that they are stupid, if it works for them and boards keep hiring them after doing so?
Or is it that they and the boards turning a quick profit by bleeding the company dry and fucking over employees and customers alike for their own gain are simply the beneficiaries of an unfair system?
That’s a good question.
I don’t have statistics to analyze, but I think investors lose more in the long term with these rushed plans to turn up a profit. Basically it hurts the company long term, they suffer a hit when they have to buyout (golden parachute clause) the CEO to fire him/her and it limits the potencial new customers and growth. So these inverstors will stop any future contributions and turn their focus elsewhere which accelerates the companies issue with lack of cash and leads to people firing which leads to other issues until company is done.
The issue with decisions like this is loss of trust. Even if Unity won’t see big loss right now, the studios will look for alternatives from now on. Hiring of new people now focus on different engines experience instead of Unity and over time Unity will be out.
So while they don’t really lose they also don’t really win anything either. If they kept the status quo they would have keep getting income and ability to cash out in the future.
I think the question is rather whether the investors expect / want the company to keep providing profit long term, or whether they just want to shake the price up enough that they can cash out on a high point and leave whatever new sucker is holding the shares now to deal with the fact that they’re turning to dust in his hands. Maybe they expected that the company wouldn’t be too profitable for much longer and figured any short term improvement was going to be as good as it gets.
The Investors are not one monolithic and everlasting hivemind that has to look towards its own future benefit. If they can pull their money out with as much profit as possible, it doesn’t matter if the company falls off a cliff the next day, so long as they got their sweet sweet Payday, which they can then invest into another company to eventually do the same to.
Or maybe they’re simply gambling on the fact that many large customers won’t be able to switch off of their platform so easily and will instead work out long-term arrangements, hoping that it will offset the loss from jettisoning the smaller ones. Industries tend to have a certain inertia, so they wouldn’t be too unreasonable with hoping the bigger ships would rather negotiate a better deal than attempt to shift their entire course.
But they didn’t get any improvement from this annoucement. Stock fell by a few % and even after changes goes live, they will still need to wait at least a few months before first games start reaching their thresholds to start generating that runtime fee revenue. By that time a lot of studios will have had enough time to re-import their games to other engines and fix incompatibilities. Sure enterprise users that paid 5k per year per license might stick around, but that’s not new revenue.
I think it’s really hard and dangerous to make such sweeping predictions ahead of time. I heard people clamour that the Reddit API change would kill Reddit in a single stroke, but so far it’s somehow still running. Likewise, sone have been prophesying the end of Twitter for a while now, but so far that has only happened in the literal sense.
They may still eventually reach the end, but there’s no telling how much money investors may still be able to squeeze from them in the short term. Stock prices aren’t the only indicatoe, and short term drops don’t automatically indicate that theyre a dead end - new investors may still buy into the system.
And as for porting your games to a new engine, depending on the complexity and development progress that is just not feasible for smaller studios. If your devs are specialised in Unity, then retraining, ripping out the entire engine, hooking it up to a new one, verify their understanding of the new one is right, ironing out all the kinks the new engine brought and then proceeding with development may add a lot of delay that smaller developers can’t easily shrug off.
It might be more profitable long term, but unless you have patient and generous investors willing to wait that extra time, short term liquidity will be a consideration. It may well be more feasible to finish development as is, then move on to a new engine for new games.
Hobby game devs or those doing it as a side job may be able to afford the time to switch engines, but a lot probably don’t. Likewise, bigger companies may be able to hire or retrain teams for new engines, but that’s extra overhead and may take time too.
In short: The overall growth may be hamstrung, the decline inevitable, but if investors can squeeze out more in the short term, the mid-to-long term drop in stock value may well be just the cost of doing business. And we don’t really know for sure that it will change things at all in the long term, because business decisions are terribly complex and sometimes hard to predict without extensive insider knowledge of all parties.
I agree with hard. It’s purely based on my understanding on economics and public statements from companies I seen.
That idea died the minute the blackout ended. It was clear that the changes affected minority users and majority could’t care less that moderating would become harder and all thw other quality of life stuff be lost. Majorify of the internet still consumes ads.
It kind of did. Like the people I follow from infosec or science all transitioned to alternative platforms. The only 3 active areas on Twitter are politics, entertainment and porn. So while platform still operates it’s usefulness is limited.
Sure, but without a clear plan on user growth that is very unlikely. It would be different if they were a monopoly, but alternative engines exists and they offer better deals. They lost their main “selling” point of being free and without royalties.
I agree with new projects, but porting your existing games to the new engine is the real goal. So that you can get revenue again without possibility of going bankrupt or in debt and then start transitioning to the new engine.
I disagree as there is nothing to squeeze. Hobby devs are unlikely to reach the thresholds, small studios who are the most affected, will be forced to remove their games or risk going bankrupt or in debt and enterprise users are not really affected as they can afford 5k per year per liecense already.
Of course it’s always possible some close door deals will be made with existing users and changes will only apply to new users. Which really should have been the original announcement.
I’d like to clairfy that I generally agree with your assessment. My entire set of responses is an attempt at dialectically challenging and refining that understanding by considering alternate possibilities. I personally feel that nuanced examination of issues is an important critical thinking skill.
Public statements can be a lot of hot air too. We’re operating with a lot of unknowns here, because obviously not every company wants to immediately play with open cards and threatening to leave for the competition is a rather popular negotiation tool.
I fear the same may eventually be true for the ongoing boycotts of Unity. Ultimately, the companies with existing Unity products still need cash flow, no matter the long term repercussions of breaking strike.
Were those infosec / science microbloggers the majority? Did their followers all transition along? Otherwise we’re back to the aforementioned minority issue.
I recently chatted with someone who remarked that their engagement hadn’t taken much of a noticeable hit, and since their favourite people were also still there, there was little incentive to leave either.
These two are a specific issue of community cohesion, however, and the observation probably doesn’t apply to the Unity customer base. I simply tried to illustrate how predicting the death of something isn’t always as easy (a point I find we agree on).
That is a valid point. Professional investors probably will see the writing on the wall, and private ones may not have enough buying power to make a significant difference here if they don’t (or risk it anyway, since the stock thing seems to be a form of gambling for certain people I know).
Assuming you can pull it off in time or have the financial leeway to bear the hit for long enough, absolutely. My point, taken from acquaintances working in the industry, is that such a port isn’t always trivial. Engines tend to have their unique quirks that you eventually learn to work around, and a direct 1:1 translation isn’t always possible. As soon as you come across anything that isn’t a straight replacement, you risk (re-)introducing bugs and problems.
That said, such an existing game may be the perfect live example to learn from, and with the right communication strategy I imagine it may be possible to placate eventual frustration at such issues.
On the other hand, the selling point you mentioned (free and without royalties) may have an impact on the financial calculations of the game, and switching to a different (potentially not-free) engine may throw off those calculations. My knowledge here is limited to class I took some years ago on the topic, but things like running costs obviously get factored into the minimum viable price of a given product.
Without sufficient financial backing, they might not be able to afford removing their games either. Choosing between assured bankruptcy by taking down all your revenue and the possibility of retaining at least some revenue to tide you over until you’ve had time to port your games or publish new moneymakers, they might elect to “try to make it”, spurred by hustle culture.
Particularly if the game or studio is a passion project for them, they have an emotional bias that may cloud their judgement to swallow the bitter pill and risk bankruptcy and debt rather than giving up, and up until they’re actually bankrupt, there is at least a little to squeeze still.
On the other hand, they may be pursuing the strategy of announcing drastic changes, then yielding to public pressure and agreeing to a more reasonable solution. Sure, in the short term trust will be hurt, but with today’s news culture, there’s no guarantee the whole affair won’t be swept under the rug and forgotten by the majority in a few weeks.
All that said: Yes, it probably spells doom for smaller customers. Either they to jump ship before it sinks, or they may be forced to choose between drowning and paying extortionate fees for lifeboats. But if they weren’t the most well-paying customers so far, odds are the ones looking to make money won’t miss them anyway.
And sinking the ship to sell it for parts unfortunately isn’t an entirely new phenomenon either.
The complete financialization of the US economy.
Nearly every single S&P500 company is majority owned by institutional investors, with 88% of them having one of the Big Three (Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street) as their top investor, and with the only exceptions being Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Oracle, Walmart, Comcast and Kraft-Heinz where insiders are still the top shareholders. The Big Three has 15-20% controlling stakes in nearly every large American corporation, and through the means of coordinated proxy voting, dictates the policies of the board of directors.
These institutional investors are financial capitalists who see the companies as investment vessels, not as industrial capitalists who want to grow their respective industries. They could not care less if the companies go bankrupt as long as they see a return in short term profit. Vanguard, for example, has a deep $7.7 TRILLION assets and do not care at all if some of their businesses go down.
Then you have private equity firms, also known as “corporate raiders”, who raise high stake loans to perform “leveraged buyouts” of established companies. They conduct “financial engineering” i.e. paying themselves dividends, lower wages and force overtime without pay, layoff employees, skirt labor laws, refuse to honor contracts, strip off assets and saddle the companies with debt until these are forced to declare bankruptcy. Then, like true parasites, they ditch the host and jump on to the next companies to suck off their wealth built up over the past century.
You also have venture capitalist (VC) firms that leveraged Obama’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era after 2009 to raise easy capital to profit from tech/software companies. You can read this article about how Andreesen Horowitz perform their operations to destroy software startups:
It happened to Groupon. It happened to Substack. It happened to Imgur. And many others, and it will happen to Reddit and all other software companies in America.
This is by no means only restricted to software companies though, for the rot of finance capitalism had already been sown since Reagan’s and Clinton’s deregulation era that massively expanded Wall Street’s influence, and subsequently fueled most prominently by Obama’s low interest rate monetary policy for them to encroach into every crevices of American industries.
Cisco, used to be the world’s leading telecommunications company, now a shadow of its former self after being financialized by Wall Street.
Boeing, used to be the world’s leading aviation engineering company, now churning out defective products that nearly never happened in its history, after being financialized by Wall Street.
Intel, used to be the world’s semiconductor pioneer, now struggling to keep up with Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, after being financialized by Wall Street.
And this is the fate of America - a financial oligarchy will continue to devour and strip off every remnant of the American industries built up over the past centuries, and there is nothing to stop this in its tracks.