From whose perspective?
Short answer as developers is we don’t really know. That’s how these large businesses run generally speaking. They’re not going to announce to the world all the monetary reasons why they’re doing certain actions. Their stock is in the toilet, people leaving is to be expected. Is that a sign of a resurgence? Maybe? Who knows.
I’ll say this, things could be a lot worse. No news is better than many of us were expecting. After all that crap they pulled in recent memory I was worried about horrifying new price gouging plans or even more absurd craziness as things were just getting worse and worse. At the very least the bleeding has been stemmed as of late and that’s a huge win. Unity 6 is a pleasant surprise.
We’re living in the post Riccitiello era of Unity. We’re living in the post “people who founded the company and have a hand in making the core product better” era of Unity.
If I were to GUESS as a total outside observer who knows absolutely NOTHING about this stuff either with internal knowledge or business saavy. Unity now has some competent management (thank god), but they’re lacking a driving vision and they’re not going to want to take a gamble on ANYTHING, and that includes any sort of radical shifts to improve either. They’re likely simply trying to stabilize in this current climate of tech where everything is in absolute *&%)ing shambles and nothing is for certain.
Here’s what we DO know. It appears they have more people internally who want to improve moral, get employees excited again and get them to be at least somewhat useful at a minimum.
But do they have the rare spirit and talent internally that’s fired up to take on the world to produce incredible new things? Doubtful, again they’re not going to be in a very risk heavy mindset right now. Other studios are going to be in better positions to do that from scratch, namely Godot.
I don’t know anything about Luis other than hearing from him a few times in some public quarterly reports. He sounded well meaning enough, but was just another money guy, and he was obviously there through all the crazy policy debacles and while everything went down the tubes. Probably not his fault, but you can’t help but think anyone around during that period wasn’t part of any solutions either.
To be blunt, Unity was in a real sh*t place not long ago for us developers. And I’ll personally take any kind of shakeup if only to watch that version of Unity all come crashing down.
But it could be signs that they’re cutting their losses and entering their twilight stage of existence, they innovated and pioneered for over a decade, it’s amazing they were on top for so long, perhaps it’s time for them to hunker down, wrap things up and simply maintain this crazy assortment of tech as best as possible.
Here’s the really crazy part, we may not know any better than anyone internally how anything is going, it’s all so murky and full of smoke and mirrors trying to herd cats to produce something that functions. It’s hard to sperate your own biases and ambitions from the trajectory of the fallible individuals around you. This goes for ANYONE.
Is current leadership looking to produce a great product and do they have the grit or want to take big gambles on quality talent to do great things? Or are they more concerned about LOOKING like they’re trying to do so as is so often the case at the large companies?
The optimist in me is hoping yes. But the pessimist in me is bracing for them to fail if they are indeed looking to try to do great things again.
Companies are large places for people with deep pockets and others with technical abilities to come together and act like they want to make great products hoping the other knows WTF they’re doing, and sometimes you have all the right people but just a the wrong time, there are SO MANY things that can go wrong in this crazy world. But most the time at most places, the majority are just playing house, they want to tag along for the ride and often times you zoom out and you see that it’s all a charade top to bottom.
Do the random people appear at the right time showing their capabilities and drive to create awesome things? Do they even give enough of a darn to take a gamble on such people? Will they mistakenly gamble on the wrong individuals and have everything go to crap?
Or worse yet maybe they take a gamble on the right people, and this crazed world ends up grinding them to a pulp and spitting them out because they don’t align with some other individuals within the company’s crazed monetary schemes or who knows what else.
Tech is weird, and we live in an increasingly insane, and stupid world that led to Unity ending up where it is. It was bad enough when we just had the greedy as hell John Riccitiello’s to worry about. Now we have all this new age market manipulations and other crazy crap.
It’s all so strange. I’m still waiting for this twilight zone episode to be over. But in the meantime, just glad things aren’t worse.
