Per the CEO in today’s meeting:

“This is a ploy to gather more people to use Level Play [advertising network]. The mediation provider [advertising network] makes a cut off every ad, and right now a lot of people are on AppLovin Max [not Unity’s], so a big part of this is they want people to switch to Level Play, and by doing that they’ll make way more than the install pricing they’re suggesting. It’s too early to panic, but it is a big change”

If that sounds like a ramble, it’s because it was, but the tl;dr is it seems Unity is giving a secret pass to companies that switch to use Unity’s advertising solution.

Also some quick fun facts:

  • Unity was never profitable
  • Unity gave up competing with Unreal over a year ago
  • Godot is a free and open source engine that competes with Unity professionally
  • The trash App Store/Play Store games spy on you extensively, although Apple and Google have significantly limited their spying ability over the last couple years (i.e we used to open your camera in the background, can’t do that anymore)

Update:

CEO is in talks with some Unity folks. The impression is “this decision came from very high up in Unity” from an exec who “had no idea how bad of an idea it was”. We’re expecting a public revision shortly (next couple days)

    • SirNuke@kbin.social
      21·
      1 year ago

      From a quick search, John Riccitiello received about 11 million in total compensation in 2022. In comparison:

      During the fourth quarter of 2022, we bought 42.7 million shares back at an average price of $35.10 per share. With this buyback, we returned $1.5 billion to shareholders as part of our $2.5 billion share buyback program.

      We need to call buybacks what they are: a method of siphoning value from where it was created and is useful and into the hands of the already wealthy.

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
        41·
        1 year ago

        How are buybacks functionally different in that regard than dividends, which have always existed?

        Apple, for instance, paid out $14 billion in dividends in 2020. The only difference between paying that directly in dividends as opposed inflating the value of stock through buybacks is that dividends are directly taxed while stocks won’t be until they’re sold.

        Sure, it enables a bit of tax tomfoolery (which also benefits anyone with a 401k, I might add), but the simple matter that companies return value to shareholders isn’t new, and stock buybacks don’t represent some meaningfully different form of this.

        • SirNuke@kbin.social
          6·
          1 year ago

          I’m going to assert a few things up front:

          • A company that is struggling to keep its head above water should not be paying 2.5 billion to shareholders. The mechanism - dividends or buybacks - is not the problem.
          • There’s a hidden assumption in your first statement. Just because dividends have always existed does not mean they necessary or optimal. I actually don’t have an answer to that, only that it is an assumption worth challenging.
          • I’m typing this on an M2 Macbook Air. It is an incredible technical achievement, and creating it provides real tangible value to society in its own small way that wouldn’t have existed without Apple. Apple is not struggling.
          • However, Apple has 164,000 Apple Store employees. Apple Stores are part of Apple’s successful business strategy, and the retail employees are by extension part of Apple’s success. How many of them are paid enough to make their jobs a career? That 14 billion comes out to ~$85k per Apple Store employee.
          • 401(k)s are a terrible way to do retirement, and I say this as someone who has a shot at retiring. Crumbs being chucked at me doesn’t change my stance. The stories of people who ran out from nursing home stints or medical bills or whatever are just starting to trickle out.

          Since you are reading a lot into my comment I’m going to read a lot into yours. Why are things different now? The rules of the (United States) game changed, and checks against this behavior have been nullified. Value creation is a means to an end: acquire as much power as possible, and flex that to siphon value off for your shareholders.

          That’s what Unity is doing. They are flexing their power to extract value from its customers. If you use Unity, what are you going to do? Unreal is a different beast with a different target audience. Godot is untested, and I don’t blame anyone that hesitates hitching themselves to a noncommercial open source project. Porting a game to a different engine may not even be realistic anyway.

          So everyone will stomp their feet and complain and mostly keep on using Unity. Some day they’ll push too hard and that’ll be the end of them, but what do the shareholders care? They got paid. Onto the next one.

          The 11 million is irritating given how it’s more than most will make in a lifetime being paid to someone who is incompetent. The 2.5 billion is why Unity is forced to resort to destructive behaviors to stay afloat. The incentives for companies to act this, and lack of checks against it, are why the economy is broken.

        • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Dividends only work if the company has profited. In Unity’s case, if you bought shares in 2017 and waited for dividends, you’d only get them last year.

          Buybacks are basically paying for investor “promises”, “I know you’re not profitable, but I’ll buy 1 million shares today if you promise to buy them back 2 years from now”. Works great with companies that “need” to operate in the red for several consecutive years until they’re actually profitable, like Twitter or Uber

    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
      54·
      1 year ago

      Not to simp for the corpos, but this is usually a bad bet. I crunched some numbers in a recent discussion about Lowe’s, and if you simply eliminated the CEO’s compensation, each employee could get a raise of $0.02 per hour, or about $50 a year. Exec compensation, while obviously extremely high compared to individual rank-and-file employees, is still generally a pretty small portion of expenses, even just labor expenses, because there as so many more standard employees.

        • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          Lowe’s was being discussed as a company that was particularly bad for paying its workers poor wages. I don’t think the math really changes much no matter where you go. Feel free to name whatever company you want though and I’ll gladly crunch the numbers. I did McDonald’s a while back, and while I don’t remember the exact figures, you could eliminate most of the exec team without materially affecting worker pay.

          If you spend all your money on CEO salaries, bonuses, buildings

          I don’t think it materially affects things, but you’re moving the goal posts here. Buildings are a legitimate business expense. Lots of employees get paid bonuses.

          To throw another company at you, the CEO of Ford had a total comp of $20,996,146 in 2022. Ford has somewhere around 170,000 employees. Liquidating him (which is a bit questionable, given that a lot of CEO compensation is in company stock, and part of that stocks’ value comes from the fact that the CEO holds it) and distributing that value evenly to all employees gives every employee a grand raise of $123 a year, or about $10 a month. So, in exchange for losing the CEO, everyone gets to go to Starbucks twice a month.

          Sure, there are more execs than the CEO, but there aren’t that many, and they’ll naturally be paid less as well. The fact of the matter is that exec pay really isn’t a huge portion of the company’s overall labor costs.