So the Unity stakeholders were less willing to let John do the "if you want something no one’s gonna accept, announce something even more horrible and then release a ‘we heard you’ statement where you announce the thing you wanted in the first place as comprise " bullcrap?
If they had initially introduced a normal revenue share system like they’re offering now, very few people would have complained. I find the notion that this was all a deliberate move from Unity rather silly. The only thing it achieved was serious damage to their reputation (which wasn’t great in the first place).
It can be both. It can be a deliberate, albiet stupid move. I think that they always intended to walk back the initial offer, they just bit off more than they could chew.
Oh, it is silly and it is stupid. Yet, it’s how EA acted under Johnny here. That’s the time they were regularly voted as the worst US company. They pulled this with so many things (“Fun surprise mechanics”)
First rule of technology: if the increase in complexity and decrease in reliability outweigh the added tangible value, don’t implement it. This is why it’s usually best to avoid “smart” appliances or, you know, brain implants.
now that the low hanging fruit of internet scraping is exhausted, we're gonna have to start purpose-building datasets. this will be expensive and might be the new bottleneck on AI progress.
He cash out his stock, tried this clown moved as he was instructed by the BoD, it didn't work.
He gets more money and he gets to exit...
Nothing to celebrate. They will try something similar soon enough and by then public will be beaten up enough to accept it as it happen with everything else.
Yes, this is totally a symbolic move and nothing has meaningfully changed at Unity. Riccitiello is probably walking away with many millions of dollars and the rest of the leadership team who were fully onboard with the new licensing plan are still there. Once the negative press dies down, Unity will try something equally shitty again.
Developers would be foolish to trust this company ever again.
Thankfully, this has been an eye opener for many to the risks of building a business that’s dependent on a closed platform. We’ll see how it shakes out, but there’s a lot more buzz about Godot than there ever had been in the past.
I think it’ll ship, because EA has probably sunk a lot into it already. But there will also be a huge amount of pressure for it to make a shitload of money so it’ll most likely release half-finished and loaded with microtransaction nonsense.
Then there will most likely be a backlash like there was with Anthem and possibly Bioware will limp along for a bit, maybe become a support studio for someone else for a while, but I don’t really see them making another big game after this, at least in their current form.
There was talk of a new Mass Effect game IIRC but that could really be made by any of EA’s studios, it’s not like anyone who made the originals special will still be at Bioware anyway.
I’m a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).
They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.
This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There’s an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn’t like movie tie-ins one day.
There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.
Black Flag without the real-world stuff would have been great. I need to see if there’s a good pirate game out there. I played Sid Meir’s Pirates! or whatever it was called, but a 3D pirate game like Sea of Thieves, but single player… hmm.
How else are you meant to interpret this other than it being a bad sign for the studio? Laying off staff in the “home stretch” of a project? I’m sure getting an end game credit will be sufficient consolation for getting ditched at the last stages of a multi year development.
Also no leadership changes either? Not even after andromeda? Sure it’ll be super humbling to sack workers for what seem like incompetent leadership in BioWare since ME3.
Frankly I’m surprised it’s taken this long for BioWare to begin the traditional EA pipeline of being “taken out back” after being squeezed for every bit of profit.
Are we really pretending EA doesn’t do this to every studio that shows a hint of profit decrease? It’s been a major part of their business model for a decade or more.
Too late. Still not enough to keep me from going back to Linux. Especially now that I’m all excited to try NixOS with Hyprland. This was your last mistake, Microsoft. 🫤
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