John Riccitiello is stepping down

I like Carmack but he is really not suited for a CEO position of a public corparation of thousands of people doing a hundred different things. I can't picture him wanting to spend all of his time in meeting rooms talking to suits, legal & finance and doing basically no meaningful programming.

 

"Today, we fired all management, banned all meetings and decided to focus on our space program".

Spoiler

 

Almost sound like recent twitter

 

Unity board is too big and too greedy for that. Even if John is available and willing to join ain't gonna happen.

 

Now when Microsoft has acquired Activision Blizzard, CEO Bobby Kotick is gonna step down Jan 1 2024. I bet he'd make a great CEO for Unity.

 

I heard the news, then some familiar word

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pka...umventing-red-hats-controversial-new-strategy
July 27 2023

Huh...

 

If we're going to make joke recommendations here's mine.

Spoiler: Developers Developers Developers

 

How about Darl McBride? He recently went through bankruptcy so he will probably be pretty cheap and also has the necessary experience to lead Unity through its next inevitable steps.

 

Peter D. Molyneux would be a great fit. Grand promises, poor delivery almost every turn and once in a blue moon puts out a masterpiece. It's just like Unity itself, it would be a great fit.

 

This made me LOL.

 

He was constantly playing around with AI too. With how they're trying to move into that space they'd love him.

 

He's a little behind the curve, still on the NFT train.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/pe...t-in-time-for-nfts-to-be-completely-worthless

 

Define 'playing around' as apparently everything in that Milo project was entirely faked and never actually worked.

 

There was Black and White 2 with variable behavior of your pet which you could train. Although it was adjusting weights of likelyhood of an event...

 

Not entirely faked, it was a siri/cortana/alexa type of chatbot, which mean tons of boilerplate to cover every situation and it was still very brittle, the fake part is the staging to avoid showing the seam of the simulation. Especially when you add the complexity of credible animation on top and credible continuity of emotion.

It was too early for the tech to be convincing, but we already have a more complex proof of concept, it's called façade by Mateas, that's probably the inspiration too.

It's also more possible to do it at indie level now (even without llm) than back then.

 

The only source for this is the TED Talk that Peter Molyneux gave and he is anything but a trustworthy source.

 

NO

https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/21/4063508/milo-and-kate

I monitor everything notable in the "interactive fiction" space, and hold a thread on tigsource cataloguing resources of that type.

 

You mean this whole thing that says it was beyond fragile? How the voice recognition barely worked? How the only thing they really got working effectively was drawing recognition, something we've had since basically the Palm Pilot?

 

are you negative just for the sake of being negative?
Because:

We are saying LITERALLY the same thing?

Look, something barely working is still working, we are in agreement, maybe disagree on what threshold "working" mean, but that would semantic stupidity.

It seems that people have fantastic expectation vs realistic expectation. Chatbot (remember the reference I open with?) of that era qualify as barely working, and they are just text, adding animation and early recognition on top was an obvious recipe for disaster, but it worked, not just to a fantastical expectation level, but a broken experiment level. Facade work, I consider that brittle and maybe barely working based on your seemingly expectation, after all, talking about everything won't register, and many input will be miscategorized. Maybe because I monitor these thing, I have a set level of expectation that is reasonable and not star trek?

What's with all these discussion where the only argument and analysis is that "things isn't star trek level, therefore trash". Imagine if the paper about "sprite impostor" just came out, and instead of finding the right application the reception is "that's trash, it cannot compete with mesh polygon", i mean yeah that's not the point? At this level what are we talking about? Like I'm not used to that level of blank vitriol, that's a net shift from the culture of making game, is it people burning out on Unity's broken promise? Yet another thing to blame on John?

 

My dude, it didn't work at all. It didn't even work to the specifications of existing technologies. Milo was a complete mess and a clear case not just of Peter Molyneux overpromising, but also something that not only never could have worked, but never even worked internally.

You say brittle, you say chatbot, it didn't even live up to that. You say you keep track of these things, but you keep track of things pretty messily and will constantly say "we're saying the same thing" but then stretch the definition of what the same thing is to unreasonable levels. You've done this so much that it's what I chiefly recognize you by.

Nearly 15 years ago, Milo was failing to live up to chatbots of the time. By Molyneux's own admission, Milo knew like 500 words and failed to recognize even those. To put that into perspective, Seaman, a game that came out nearly a decade before Milo, had a vocabulary of about 250 words. It employed all the same tricks Milo was claimed to, but also did so more effectively.

I am not expecting Star Trek, I am expecting mediocrity and being disappointed.

 

Bro all your word are qualitative, there are not factual, qualitative is subjective, you are the one stretching definition to fit your agenda. You are just leveraging accusation. We do agree it's a mess, maybe? is that's stretching your definition too? That's subjective though, being a mess tell you nothing about HOW it works, which is how I look at thing.

You realize there was other people working on the game that aren't Molyneux, how about listening to them too? And yeah BRITTLE mean it's barely functioning, and chatbot is a method, the scale of vocabulary don't matter, I refer to pattern matching, keywords-> answer, I'm a dev I understand tech, I don't care about lofty expectation. I'm going to explicitly requalify chatbot here to interactive fiction, IF THAT WORD BOTHER YOU AND YOUR EXPECTATION. Satisfied?

So maybe we aren't saying the same thing, BECAUSE, you aren't saying much of anything factual, maybe it's a culture clash, maybe the way I think and assess thing clash with your expectation, i'm talking technique, you are talking about living up, so okay to me it's nonsense, there is NO FACTUAL THRESHOLD to what living up mean. How about we stop expecting we both use words to mean the same thing, we comes from different perspective and obviously we can't meet eyes to eyes.

Define work:
- you started at barely function in your previous post
- then shift to didn't work at all when I replied
- so which is which?
- moving the goalpost as you feel, but i'm the one stretching definition?
- I'm quite literal, something works mean the implementation run,
- do you mean it doesn't work as an experience? Ie what I call expectation?
- Or maybe you aren't satisfied it doesn't recognize words all the time, even though it does some time? That's qualitative, not technical.
- is that enough keeping track of things for you?

To recap my perspective as literal as possible (subjective part are italicized, not as in my subjectivity, but part that can only be assess under subjective metrics):
- Milo was a basic adventure game based on branching vignette where you interact with simple (voice) keyword recognition to trigger basic reactions at key states, that's basically the genre of text interactive fiction but in 3d.
- But like interactive fiction (IF) with loose pattern matching, you can make it so it appear doing more than it does (in demo), but the simplicity will break the experience for anyone expecting too much and devolve into simple pattern, like IF once the magic disappear you end up using just noun verb pair, which when you expect more is disappointing.

On top of that add:
- trouble with hardware (simple keyword speech recognition and motion recognition),
- game design difficulty (broadcasting what ACTION can be done or not, ie gameplay boundary),
- UI design issues (how to tell the play HOW to act, and direct it to what can be acted on) compounded by hardware issues.
- Staged demonstration that skirt around issues in a fixed narrative, creating a sense it does more than it can.
- People fantasy projected on that demo with Molyneux sugar coating to hell and back.

When I assess Milo, I'm aware of all of that. I know how the tech works, I know I shouldn't expect fluent expression and expensive freeform animation and interaction. Seaman work best because the format lower expectation (literal fish, almost no story, no structured interaction, limited environment complexity and affordances).

Is that enough tracking for you? Is that less messy?
Do we have to get emotional about a stupid demo made in the eons?
Because you don't like how I talk about it?

Stay tunes for the next episode of Murgilod get mad at tech for some reason. You've done this so much that it's what I chiefly recognize you by.

 

Extremely appropriate that you're downplaying the impact poor leadership can have on a project in a thread about John Riccotiello leaving Unity.

 

Because I'm talking about the tech, there is no downplaying when IT'S NOT WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
ALSO WHY WOULD YOU DOWNPLAY THE CONTRIBUTION OF PEOPLE WHO DID THE TECH BECAUSE LEADERSHIP MESSED UP?

 

That just means he's even more appropriate for Unity.

 

To be fair he checks all the right tick boxes.
- Was a software developer
- Extensive portfolio of successful business
- Saved Activision from bankruptcy in 1990
- Been in the game industries since 1991
- Best performing CEO of 2016

So I can see this happening if we're in the best timeline for Unity.

 

While I don't like Kotick, at least there is no creative vision to mess up at unity, but not sure if decision that are profitable vs decision that makes dev happy are able to align currently, no matter who the CEO is. And it seems it would also tank the company culture and high profile employee, if Kotick happen, so I don't actually know.

 

Please stop suggesting people that would be terrible as CEO for Unity.

 

Imagine if Unity strangely decides to hire Mr. Jim Ryan for CEO.
Reggie Fils Aime might probably be a better fit for CEO though.

 

I'll vote for Chuck Norris to be CEO because he'll kick some serious butt to get things done

Spoiler

 

You don't need to vote on him, because he can vote on himself bazillion times.

 

What about Jeff Minter? He's actuially quite wild and would suit being Unity CEO perfectly.

 

I don't see a reality where Unity is going to choose a nerdy game designer/programmer who has focused their entire career on making oddball small scale games to run a multi-billion dollar public mega corp with a board of money people.

 

...and where would they keep all the sheep and llamas?. There just wouldn't be space for them.

 

Chat GPT isn't person

 

That would have been goatpunk... You know, the most popular genre you can play in goatar hero.

 

This kind of reminds me that whoever takes over should try and Unity a bit more fun again and less corporate and serious.

 

Obviously, I want someone to crack jokes with a smile while they screw everyone over and make the worst decisions possible.

 

+ 1

 

*raises hand*

 

When the Unity CEO asks to pull their pinky and a 5% price increase with intrusive data collection comes out on the other end of theirs... those will be the great times!

 

Bring back the collar guy again!

 

Helgason is on the board of directors.

 

But with more collar

 

whoever it is, here's ready list of many good points to fix,
https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1712273764338278715

 

Just a preview:

Spoiler

 

Yeah, none of those are probable though, unfortunately.

 

https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1712506072437842100

I'd say he's dead f*cking on. I especially like the idea of funding 3rd party tools and persuing KNOWN avenues of enhancing the engine.

"4) Nuke any duplicate tech stacks, period. 1 renderer, 1 UI system, 1 network stack, 1 input system, 1 animation system, 1 particle system."
1000 times this as well. And do them RIGHT. Once done, if your company is COMPETENT you can create data driven tools to migrate a great deal of existing project setups with legacy systems towards to the new standard that is light and efficient and does what it needs to do with no excess fluff. Unity often uses their customers as an excuse to not fix their sh*t. I use legacy stuff EVERYWHERE in my project (obviously, we all do). I would HAPPILY rebuild my animation tools and UI if it meant a far superior system. That's just f*cking gamedev. Make it light, make it perfect, don't ship till its ready, and make it an absolute joy to work with by being ergonomic and easy to interface with both in code and in editor.

Unity is fat and lazy, a common company culture. Everyone throws their hands up and finds excuses to not do stuff, employees become simultaneously frustrated by incompetence of upper management, but also secretly content they can get their paychecks for surfing Twitter all day. Pretend to be frustrated while being on cruise control, that's the name of the game as a see no evil hear no evil culture grips the insides and standards crater. 100% risk averse, conveniently no one has to do their damn job.

They've secretly given up, they hold no standards for themselves or others. All the money you pay them so you can bust your arse working with their decayed tools that none of the current human resources are responsible for goes into overinflated rent in Silicon Valley so they can continue playing house.

I need to try to get some work done today so I'm going to stop thinking about how FUBAR this entire situation is.

 

That's simply ridiculous and would set Unity back 5 more years.
Even founding a new company and Engine would be smarter than that.

 

Set them back 5 years? What have they accomplished in 5 years?! You mean DOTs and ECS that has frozen their entire pipeline and killed all their forward progress. The endless acquisitions that create nothing of value? The ballooning brain trusts with soft hands and no technical ability to produce usable assets?

This company hasn't done a damned thing in 10 f*cking years. The ONLY thing added to this engine that's improved at all is the Prefab pipeline and the package manager. They hemmorage BILLIONS every F*CKING YEAR. If you'd told me there were 6 employees at Unity, I would wonder, "what do half of them do?"