What ...encouraged the initial decision to increase the price? Because I can think of a few examples of discouragement, such as the backlash against Reddit, that should have given the executives an idea of what could happen as a result. Yet they went through with it which makes me think:
a) the company truly believed people would pay;
b) They believed that the fallout would not be that bad; or
c) Worst case, they did not consider fallout at all and just said raise it.
Honestly, Reddit just kind of sat out the backlash and at least in the short term got their way. So it's one loss for wizards, one win for Reddit, I could say them rolling the dice on 50/50.
But they overestimated how locked in their customer base were and how much more resourced game developers were to challenge them on their shenanigans than third party Reddit app developers.
I've largely left Reddit since they backstabbed third-party apps and frontends, and seized subreddits and banned moderators protesting their decision. Checking https://subredditstats.com, many subreddits (ranging from smaller ones like CRTgaming, to larger ones like funny) have had comment volume drop off by 75-90% in July 2023 with no sign of recovering. So assuming Reddit isn't throttling/blocking subredditstats from viewing comments (and making itself look bad), I'd say people are leaving Reddit, but unfortunately I'm not sure if any of the community-run alternatives are as popular as Reddit is now (or was before the user exodus).
I was planning to ditch it originally, but with a huge chunk of power mods gone I've actually found there to be a noticeable improvement in discussion quality within the subreddits I care about. It's nothing amazing, but it's the return of a casual feel I had been missing for some time. This has made me hesitant to check out lemmy, since I presume that's where they have retreated too. Think I will probably stay until they finally kill old.reddit.com.
It's a conflicting feeling since I'm still pretty bummed out by the api changes, but also recognize that much of the power mods capabilities were fueled by it.
> I'm not sure if any of the community-run alternatives are as popular as Reddit is now (or was before the user exodus).
This is the key for Reddit - there are no good alternatives.
Specifically for entertainment. That subreddit about the book series you're reading, the show you're watching, the video game you play, and the sports team you cheer for is hard to replace.
There's Lemmy. Some of the Reddit third-party apps have converted to Lemmy apps - Sync for Lemmy and Boost for Lemmy notably. Sync was my to-go Reddit app, so I'm happy to see it resurrected.
lemmy.world is the instance I chose, and I'm having a fine time there. Things could be a bit more livelier, and I'm sure it'll happen with time.
I'm one of those left that also deleted their years long accounts, and if I have to visit Reddit for something (as in, via search results), it's with an adblocker on.
I think reddit is also inflating user numbers a lot. People that have been there longer mostly notice the drop in engagement. Could be that there are new subs that have distinct user bases that are buzzing along. But the perception of less content is more or less universal for users I know with few to no exceptions.
This was a process that already started before the policy changes around API access though.
Keep in mind that some reddit mods have said thar site has incorrect numbers since June. I don't know how they get their stats but the api throttling may have affected the data. That assumption may be to the contrary.
>, I'd say people are leaving Reddit, but unfortunately I'm not sure if any of the community-run alternatives are as popular as Reddit is now (or was before the user exodus).
Well, I'm here on HN :). There is no perfect community driven alternative, but between HN, Tildes, and various Discords I get most of what I wanted. Also keeping an eye in the long term on certain forming sites.
But there are a few niche subjects I use reddit for so it hasn't been a complete migration. Once I find any community talking about mobile gaming scene I should be fully set.
For Reddit the alternative is non-existent so people had no choice but to stay and Reddit knew this very well. It's also something that's tied into the human reward system and fosters a sort of addiction which makes any attempt to leave even harder.
Unity has none of those things. It's a stone cold tool designed to make money for game developers and there are clear alternatives in Unreal and Godot. Now sure there are people who've based their entire career around knowing Unity, but those skills are reasonably transferrable.
Eh, Lemmy is only Reddit in terms of its thread layout, but overall it's set up far more like Discord. Lots of loosely coupled small servers with no overall aggregation since federation is entirely optional. Reddit's main process of aggregation and subreddit discovery, i.e. the "front page", is afaik not a concept on Lemmy. HN is far more like Reddit than Lemmy, and probably has more users too.
They were unfortunately also caught completely unprepared at the time and fell flat on their face when it was time to scale up to accept Reddit's migratory mass. I'm still not sure if I actually have an account or not because the registration process was half broken. Time will tell how prepared Godot was, but at least they released the somewhat more stable 4.1 recently.
A lot of groups who defaulted to Reddit actually got off their ass and set up a Discourse or Discord. I consider Discord a huge step backward, but those who set up Discourse groups are now in a much better place.
So, a lot of the technical people who made Reddit the "go to" place for searching are now gone. As that half-life of the knowledge of those groups kicks in, the usefulness of Reddit is going to slide down.
I do wish more groups sought an actual alternative and not a closed down server. But I suppose for a mod (who would lead that charge) that closing down is a benefit. They don't necessarily want every random troll to pop in and ask the same rage bait question for the 1000th time. I guess that +popularity is why many moved there.
Still am hoping for a true replacement one day. Keeping eyes on what communities popped up when the next surge inevitably happens. The real issue is grabbing the right power user who will generate a bunch of content to engage with, and that's hard to do.
Gacha games and mobile games in general were the target. Remember that all the install fee waivers that they announced initially were dependent on developers using Unity's own ad broker for mobile games.
Fate/Grand Order is one of the most profitable games on the mobile phone market, it literally makes millions and it's written in Unity. As far as I'm aware, Lasengle (the developers) don't actually have a Unity source license so they'd fall under this deal.
The console/desktop market just... was not a consideration.
To put it simply: really good writing, Fate in general being a super-franchise in the audience of anime viewers and a lot of whales willing to spend money for jpegs of their favorite anime girls.
Fate is part of the "Nasuverse" which has been around for a long time (Fate Stay/Night dates to 2004) and has the exact kind of superfan whales that leave mobile game developers salivating.
FGO is a bit outlier. Every FGO imitated games fail because no one can copy the core value: the scenario writer. Every other parts of the game has been often blamed but the writer Nasu's work is cultic popular.
If you look around lately, everybody is desperately scrounging around for more revenue and fewer free tiers/accounts/features/etc. Many of the strategies to do so will falter or fail, as here, but they’re being made all over the place.
Either a wave of greed culture happened to spontaneously wash in, or an investment economy built around perpetual exponential growth and potato-tossing is preparing for a bleak future.
A higher risk-free rate of return from e.g. Government bonds entails higher 'required rate of return' for all other investments in the economy
Suddenly, all companies need to increase their profits by 3-5 percentage points, while their costs are increasing across the board. So they need to increase sales (hard/expensive), reduce costs (might not be possible), or raise prices ('easy' to do, but customers might not accept it)
Companies can't just continue raising and burning money forever. At some point they have to charge an amount that's worth the value they provide. We're weirdly not used to that concept after a decade or more of low interest rates, but it's something we're going to need to get familiar with - paying for things we use that save us or make us money.
Or, we decide that at the price of free it was worth it, but we don't like it enough to pay anything. There are certainly things like that for me.
I do agree with the sentiment that we have become too accostumed to not paying for certain things. The question is whether I like it enough to pay to keep it around.
I agree. People seem to imagine there's some evil cartoon character twirling a moustache figuring out how to comically oppress them, when the reality is usually a lot more mundane.
Ehh threes a bit of mustache twirling. Unity isn't profitable becsuse it didn't charge enough. It's not profitable because it was focused on growth and promising big profits later. A strategy that worked for some of the largest sites out there.
This generates bad pr with customers becsuse customers just want their (very long standing) issues fixed and instead they announce a billion dollar acquisition-merge with ad tech and a bunch of other new products for different industries. So when the pricing changes hit these already frustrated customers, the backlash was severe. You don't fix the core issues and charge more for the engine you broke in some places?
If we had shareholders happy with steady profits we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. They'd focus on the core product and have much leaner teams that do R&D for maybe 1-2 new products. But that's now how the stock market works.
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> What ...encouraged the initial decision to increase the price?
Probably money. You don't seem to have considered the alternatives, one of which may have been mass layoffs or even total failure. Asking for more money is never easy, but I don't think that means companies just shouldn't do it.
I imagine seeing money-printing machines like Genshin Impact ("HoYoverse [2022] revenue was around 3.844 billion USD and their overall net income was around 2.27 billion USD") run on Unity was a great source of encouragement.
Mihoyo specifically has a separate license for the Unity engine and the source code of Unity itself IIRC, meaning that Unity likely already struck a separate deal with them on that matter.
But yeah, the revenue on everyone else is likely what they were after.
Reddit is a frivolous time waste, video game backlash is a frivolous time waste.
A game engine is fundamentally a year of learning investment on the side of the game dev before employment. For a business a game represents half a decade or more of an investment, and several man-centuries oinvested.
The Unity team severely misunderstood what the liability of being an unstable partner would look like. And did so by trying to extrapolate based on a gamer/redditer not being entertained as long/efficiently as expected.
a) the company truly believed people would pay;
b) They believed that the fallout would not be that bad; or
c) Worst case, they did not consider fallout at all and just said raise it.