Unity well and truly thought everyone would just roll over on this, and oh boy, were they wrong. They didn’t at all learn from the Wizards of the Coast debacle at the beginning of the year.
WoTC, Reddit, Twitter, now unity. All made changes that their user base said they wouldn’t like, made the changes anyway, then lost a bunch of users. There must be some new business Guru telling everybody to piss off their customers
we’re not their customers, we’re the product they sell.
Can’t sell a product that isn’t using the site any more.
People are still using Reddit and Twitter, and they will continue to do so unless something truly catastrophic happens.
People are still using MySpace, Tumblr, and FARK. What’s your point?
Then which “product that isn’t using the site anymore” were you referring to?
Those sites are still dead, given how low the population is. MySpace still exists, but it doesn’t really have an audience. And you can’t sell ads without an audience.
Unfortunately, they all seem to be working from the techno-feudalism playbook. It started when tech companies realized they could make more by making us rent software instead of selling it to us, and it’s spread.
Techno-feudalism sounds cooler than enshitification and way cooler than what it is.
Pretty sure Elon was first to the key, and the rest have followed suit.
In seriousness, though, the primary driver is the VC tap slowing down significantly and forcing long term business strategy to lean much harder into its existing opportunities vs. planning for periodic cash infusion from investors. A lot of these businesses never had to set themselves up for success in the absence of that capital, and it’s led to bad practices and product strategies.
Really would be amazing if godot became the Blender of the games world. A serious open source contender used by major studios.
A stand-up move from Re-Logic. You love to see it when the people at the helm of a lucrative publisher are industry stakeholders rather than the all-too-common quarterly cash extractor types[1].
Yes, I am all too aware that such seemingly altruistic gestures can be calculated PR moves in disguise. I certainly understand that this move will earn them (as a publisher) brownie points with various indie studios who may just so happen to be seeking publisher funding in the wake of an expensive mid-project engine switch. Such is the way of the world; sometimes a move can be simultaneously altruistic and good business. ↩︎
