Comment on Unity will quietly waive fees if developers switch to its ad monetisation
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 year agoInterest rates went up, shareholders asked for returns on their investment and companies are trying to get there in the least amount of time no matter the cost. Even if the cost is total destruction of the trust in their companies. CEOs are stupid like that.
luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Is it really that they are stupid, if it works for them and boards keep hiring them after doing so?
Or is it that they and the boards turning a quick profit by bleeding the company dry and fucking over employees and customers alike for their own gain are simply the beneficiaries of an unfair system?
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
That’s a good question.
I don’t have statistics to analyze, but I think investors lose more in the long term with these rushed plans to turn up a profit. Basically it hurts the company long term, they suffer a hit when they have to buyout (golden parachute clause) the CEO to fire him/her and it limits the potencial new customers and growth. So these inverstors will stop any future contributions and turn their focus elsewhere which accelerates the companies issue with lack of cash and leads to people firing which leads to other issues until company is done.
The issue with decisions like this is loss of trust. Even if Unity won’t see big loss right now, the studios will look for alternatives from now on. Hiring of new people now focus on different engines experience instead of Unity and over time Unity will be out.
So while they don’t really lose they also don’t really win anything either. If they kept the status quo they would have keep getting income and ability to cash out in the future.
luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I think the question is rather whether the investors expect / want the company to keep providing profit long term, or whether they just want to shake the price up enough that they can cash out on a high point and leave whatever new sucker is holding the shares now to deal with the fact that they’re turning to dust in his hands. Maybe they expected that the company wouldn’t be too profitable for much longer and figured any short term improvement was going to be as good as it gets.
The Investors are not one monolithic and everlasting hivemind that has to look towards its own future benefit. If they can pull their money out with as much profit as possible, it doesn’t matter if the company falls off a cliff the next day, so long as they got their sweet sweet Payday, which they can then invest into another company to eventually do the same to.
Or maybe they’re simply gambling on the fact that many large customers won’t be able to switch off of their platform so easily and will instead work out long-term arrangements, hoping that it will offset the loss from jettisoning the smaller ones. Industries tend to have a certain inertia, so they wouldn’t be too unreasonable with hoping the bigger ships would rather negotiate a better deal than attempt to shift their entire course.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
But they didn’t get any improvement from this annoucement. Stock fell by a few % and even after changes goes live, they will still need to wait at least a few months before first games start reaching their thresholds to start generating that runtime fee revenue. By that time a lot of studios will have had enough time to re-import their games to other engines and fix incompatibilities. Sure enterprise users that paid 5k per year per license might stick around, but that’s not new revenue.