Unity's New CEO Nets Millions Months After Layoffs and Scandals
Unity's New CEO Nets Millions Months After Layoffs and Scandals
Unity's new CEO is netting an $850,000 base salary and a $2 million signing-on bonus just for joining the company, it has been revealed.
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"wow, laying off so many people when he's getting 2M in salary"
Look I also think 2m as ludicrous as a bonus considering he hasn't done anything yet. But that's like the salary of 5 senior engineers in SF (where Unity is HQ'd).
Laying off 1800 sounds harsh and will hurt a lot of people, but the reality is that they are losing 100s of millions per quarter and the only options they have are: hiking fees (what the previous CEO tried) to increase or aggressively firing people to lower operating expenses; status quo would just resulted in unity running out of money and going bankrupt, meaning the choices of engine will be Unreal and Godot. As much as I wished the latter would be more utilized, the reality is that most existing indie games rely on unity, them going bankrupt would have massive repercussions on the gaming community.
So the CEO. I think most fail to realize his job isn't to push a button saying "layoff 25% of the workforce" and get his paycheck. He decides which teams to kill, which offices to blow up, how many can be sacrificed without shit hitting the fan, then make sure post firing that the company will keep running. Cause as much as reddit/Lemmy like to trash on unity, they tend to forget that unity is not just an engine, but provides a lot of the services for running a game (updates, maintenance, multiplayer servers, in game transactions), them shutting down would mean many games would just go down with them.
Then by the logic of modern capitalism, doesn’t Unity (and thus, modern gaming) need a hard reboot? It sounds like there is t enough competition in the market, and one company has become “too big to fail” without massive repercussions.
Alternatively, you mention another engine. I don’t know shit about the nuts and bolts of gaming: but if another engine exists, then it should take up space. And if Unity fails, then other games should have a stake in making sure they hire the right talent to keep their games going. Or they risk going under themselves.
Both things are happening to a certain degree:
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An Open Source Engine called "Godot" is gaining traction. But games are multi year projects and the cost of switching is an immense investment of time.
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So the clients / users of Godot are stuck in a really awkward position: If they switch and Unity somehow recovers and regains trust they made the wrong choice. And if they stay and Unity changes the rules (again) or goes down they also made the wrong choice.
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Is it wrong that I kind of wish they would anyway? I know it would be a clusterfuck, but maybe it would make people start realizing just how fragile modern games are.
Honestly a private company like Valve should consider going into the game engine business. They could probably use the same monetization as epic (5% or free on steam) and it would be a breeze for them to integrate. However it might not make financial sense for them hence they have not done it yet.
Valve already has a game engine you can use – Source – although outside of their own games, it's not really popular. Otherwise I think it's moreso that making a good general gaming engine is hard. Like, really hard. If Valve tried to compete with, say, Unreal or Unity, (especially with their relatively small team) it'd more likely than not have no chance at all. They'd need a LOT more manpower, a massive budget, and to hope that they actually make something quality enough to actually be a viable alternative. Even then, though, it doesn't have the 2 decades of content and design that Unreal and Unity have, which is pretty important. Although I suppose Source does have a lot of user-generated content.
It'd be a gargantuan investment, a massive risk that has a high likelihood of not turning out well, and even if it were successful it would likely take many years if not over a decade to actually see the benefit of it.
There's a good reason most games use an extremely small amount of engines, either that or their own in-house engines. It's a monumental task to make a great, easy-to-use, generic engine like the ones currently on the market.
IMO Valve trying to enter the game engine market would just end up being either Godot but worse, or Bevy but worse. It'd be far better if they just created a team to work on a pre-existing open-source engine, although I guess there's not any money involved in that unless they for some reason used the engine.
Do you think it would make sense for valve to donate money and effort to Godot vs improving source?
Investing in Godot probably has no sizable benfefit to Valve. But it does have a big benefit for gaming as a whole, specifically smaller or newer developers/studios. Meanwhile investing more in Source 2 may have a lot of benefit for Valve, depending a lot on their future plans.
If they invested enough to where it became a viable competitor to Unreal, it would have a benefit in preventing Epic from leveraging their fee structure to "encourage" exclusive publishing on Epic Games Store.
Yeah, the only reason source exists is because they needed an engine to cater to their own needs. Every time they update it, it's because they needed it to do something.
It would literally be easier for them to work with guys like the Godot team to improve stuff that already exists.