The neglected the core product and have the gall to justify their retroactive change of terms (after sneakingly deleting assurances to the contrary from the TOS and deleting the github repro that tracked transparency after their last PR disaster) with rising costs of maintaining the runtime that’s been falling into disrepair.
Investments carry risk. Investors may dream that it’s ok to get made whole by the game industry they tried to take over using VC money to build a dominating position and then changing terms and extracting rent but this is such an open and shut case of corporate mismanagement, deceit and hubris, no point in even trying to justify that.
If they want to survive, they fire the CEO, claw back bonuses and shares from executives and shrink the company to a size that’s warranted.
Unity can die in a fire, anyone with a choice will know better than to get into a relationship with them now. There’s enough landlords in the industry already with platforms, there’s no room for another extracting value of the hard work of creatives.
Accepting their terms requires broad changes to the industry business models - back to old EAs dream of charging by the download. And it requires open eyes walking into a relationship with a company that every time their CEO makes a shitty gamble will extract the losses from developers.
Burn it with fire.
And before the acquisition, AppLovin even offered to buy Unity for $17 bil. I'm skeptical it wouldn't have turned into a shitfest in that direction either given that they would have either focused on mobile exclusively or worked to turn normal PC gaming into adware.
Even now, Unity's quarterly statements are wtf, wth are they spending $500 million a year on "sales and marketing" for.
Valve maintains one of the biggest platforms, and their own game engine. Valve also developed CSGO, TF2, and Dota, all popular online games that need constant maintenance (and even big content updates sometimes). Valve also invested in VR and sells hardware.
Valve has 1200 employees.
To me it's easy to see why Unity lose money.
Distribution, Analytics, Multiplayer, Anticheat, Publishing Services, Anti Piracy, Storefront, Sales, Mods, Custom Content Integrations, Localisation, and most importantly discovery (things you pay for dearly outside on mobile).
They never had need to convince developers that the fee is worth it and they never had to retroactively change terms of service. They have continually invested into the system and built the trust.
Most of all, Valve chose the long term sustainable business model when everyone else in the industry tried to extract per download charges from gamers. So gamers chose the company that sold them their game collection, just in the cloud instead of nickel and diming.
And developers chose valve because they were infinitely more trustworthy and offered better tools than any of the legacy publishers. They never increased the fees because they made bad bets either (and they had a few like VR)
Yes there’s a case to be made that the 30% should be reduced now, but realistically few could compare Valve to Unity when it comes to execution and long term value balancing for developers and gamers.
I'm not "defending" Valve (actually I find it's very worrisome that they're a game developer and a platform at the same time.) I'm pointing out the fact in no way Unity can sustain 6x of employees than Valve.
It would be great if you could be Valve. Everyone wants to be Valve. But you are not Valve. Especially not if you're publicly traded or a private equity rollup - things Valve has stubbornly resisted becoming.
At this point it's too late to significantly cut costs, so yeah seems like they pushed themselves into a corner.
The sad part is that it was already perfectly obvious where were they heading after they IPO'ed.
Public shareholders don't like that. It's not good enough.
