a terrifying message about unity's future

@Unity i really hope you never get sold to either Adobe, Apple, Autodesk or worst of all Facebook.
Because that would be the biggest Nightmare for this Community and for game development in general.

So please don't even conciser, you would break so many loyal hearts.
I personally would drop my career's past Years at once and everything i learned with Unity if you do so. These Company's are everything else that what you represent and they will destroy and pest everything you and the community worked for with their corporate Greed.

It would be the Day to definitely change my Jop completely or switch to your opponents Engine Unreal at once, even if there i no awesome savior Assetstore i would not care at all.

The almost Armageddon for Unity's Community:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/f...lion-dollar-acquisition-of-unity-book-claims/

kindest regards

 

It's a very old article and I cannot access it due to their nightmarish management of their cookies. It Unity had been sold to Facebook we would know it already.

 

The article just says that Facebook were interested, but that no deal took place. I don't see anything in there which indicates that Unity showed any interest.

Also, I'm pretty sure Unity have said in the past that big businesses have showed interest and were turned down, though of course that doesn't say anything about their current plans.

 

I saw that article a long time ago. Of course facebook would be interested, I'm sure many companies trying to get control of the web are interested. What did you expect?

 

We have to go back marty! Back to the Unity Future! -- Doc

I could not resist XD

 

It's quite likely the VC will sell off the moment Unity stops expanding. It's why Unity needs lots of staff and health projections for growth, like any good business.

But I expect Unity will eventually fall foul to the dollar as the market keeps growing. There's warning stories for every big company that thought it was a good idea to piss off customers though. Autodesk is on the way out and that's a fact when Ubi goes all in on Blender. Having a single open source application that performs amazing is no longer a pipe dream but a necessary reality.

Unity would do well not to shape so that an open source alternative gets a big injection because that can easily occur. Currently Unity is best served keeping close to the community and best served not necessarily expanding so much it'll pop because people ultimately are human and every giant has fallen so far.

We've probably as a group prevented Unity making some serious errors like other companies have done so there's hope there. Community goodwill... cannot be purchased.

So far, so good. Don't leave the community behind because in an age of raytracing cards and plenty of patent-free options, it only takes Unity to make a big mistake to galvanise toward open source.

I for one do not think Unity is silly enough to ruin a good thing.

 

This really speaks to the passion that this community has for the platform!

 

*cough* *cough* Lithium

 

As a piece of forum software the Lithium implementation left much to be desired in the user experience department, I agree... but from the big picture, whole-of-Unity perspective it really wasn't a big deal.

 

Thank you all for your thoughts about this, maybe Unity would also say something about it.
I look forward to many years of Greed free Unity work anyway.

 

The Lithium event and the subsequent 360 by Unity was the undeniable proof that Unity was still a community-focused company. But that was years ago, and while I'm sure Unity learned something from the experience, there will not be a repeat of that type of about-face from the ever growing, ever changing Unity of today. The next time a mistake like that is made we will not see a community-focused course correction... those days are over.

 

I think i live in a dreamworld that is all about Unity and my naive expectation is of coarse they will never make the transition or get sold to those giant greedmachines.

 

We'll have to wait and see if this is truly the case. Our almost immediate response to Lithium was in the form of at least two community moderators, many major community members, and many minor community members discussing the possibility of creating our own forum and migrating.

Suddenly losing some of the best people - people that regularly post helpful comments to threads created across the entire forum - would be a heavy blow for a community. I wouldn't underestimate the effect that could have in future cases too.

 

You mean my massive private strop and threat to stop ever using the forum again as well of course but yes all moderators in private said no to it before it went out. They didn't listen and had no choice.

It's as if community managers don't get that we've spent up around a decade with this community... it's not like we don't know it like the back of our hands + know the people and their own quirks and problems and work with instead of mindless blanket rulings. I've thrown out many reports about regulars here because sometimes... people have a bad day and a community is about overcoming that together.

This community is high value for Unity, it's not replicated anywhere else. I know these things because I've in part helped shape it. I don't want thanks, I want people to recognise that the community belongs to the community, not Unity.

Unity owns the forum servers and software. Not the people, don't forget that. My goal is a business transaction where the customers (us) and Unity mutually benefit and grow equally. Not one for the sake of the other.

I'm not saying Unity is evil but new staff can be aggressive about progress for their own CV and ignore over a decade of regular steady growth. That's a boat that is pointless to rock.

 

I find that the Dicsord Server is not specially helpful and the Forums still the best place to ask questions.
maybe the Discord thing also hurt the Forum a bit.
inside a discord chat thing go under very fast...

 

Can't spell Unity without comm.., oh wait, that's backwards.

 

Interesting contribution @Martin_H .. well the CEO seems to have a past on the Dark side of the force
and it might give some ideas what he might wanna do with Unity, but we don't know that.
Maybe he fall so much in love with Unity that he would never do that.

 

A sell out might not be a bad thing, the software might end up in a company with better regression history

 

I think unity has a very strong community, stronger than most engines out there, and a lot of it isnt due to anything unity have done specifically but the many different sets of circumstances that have led to this community maturing the way it has (the community has become a sentient beast XD). I think as long as unity keeps the community at its core, as it has done for a long time, whatever they choose to do will be okay in the long run.

The engine and by extent who owns it is not what keeps unity going, its the community who use said engine

 

Ahh, memories of the old new forums.

 

Don t paint everything black.
We have reached status quo and a paradigm shift where community driven software development shows the strongest sustainable growth.
see
Blender
Epic
Unity

This 3 alone define a big part of next years growth in entertainment like realtime movies, games and full immersive vr and ar experiences.

So when i would be google i would buy unity tomorrow when possible. Never understood Amazons move.

Communities, are not easy to handle. In special when there are lots of different interests.
Unity has the widest spread and the community management got more complicated mostly because of different interests like industrial visualisation needs, indi gaming, vr, mobile, A to AAA ....

What i don t understand is that there seems to be no learning anymore .

Only some examples. Personal selection because more involved.

Assets and Communities

Bakery
Final IK
Rewired

Top quality. No question stays unanswered. 100%Bugfixing in a few days.
Everything green. Handled by 3 people. Self regulated.


Development and Communities

SRP s
perfect, big moves, developed on git, feedback in forums.
Think for the teamsize and complexity of the move, top notch.


2 Community killers

Unity precalculated GI like PLM and Enlighten integration.
omg, Biggest community and performance killer for now .
Due to really low quality and slow to no progress for years exploding threads on the forum. Solutions far from productive quality.

FPS Sample
Hundreds of Github Forks. Lots of Forum activities and answers from the team in first months.
Then around 14. december total communication stop on the forums without any further answer from the complete team.
That s an behaviour who s really hard to understand and an community killer. There is no excuse. Even when there comes something bigger.

Yes Unity has one of the strongest communities.
But it s not the strongest because of some strange behaviour.

 

I think most of the current rumours are about a possible Unity IPO in 2020.

Rumours about a single company buying them instead are so old-fashioned, since we now have the scriptable share offering pipeline