In 2019 Unity reached out to me for feedback after I cancelled my subscription. I wrote them a pretty long and detailed email on how to save the company. But, since most of things I suggested never happened they ignored it I guess. Though, they did sort of fix integrating a bit and they closed unity connect. However, they never replaced unity connect with something else which is a problem.
My email response:
"1. I felt that throughout my subscription that there was a lot of "do it yourself" and "here's a video." Some of that is fine, but there's a point at which it all feels a little money-grabby. You've paid for the subscription! Now pay for some extra lessons, assets, etc.
I would recommend extending personal assistance, e.g. assigning someone to be a studio's success guide that sticks around from beginning to end.
Also provide a job market similar to fiverr for commissioning logo, concept, 3d artists, musicians, sound effect, software engineers, etc. If you can't swing that maybe partner with sites like upwork or fiverr that can handle it. I'd actually recommend the fiverr model for art and content, it's more affordable in the long run. Upwork's model is better for developers or writers, though. Unity connect felt like walking through a dark alley in a 3rd world country waiting to be mugged.
You provided me with plenty of customer loyalty specialists to bother me to resubscribe after the project failed, but didn't support my efforts when I needed it most. The outcome could have been different if there was a support structure along the way that assisted in the different aspects of building a successful game company and product. That just wasn't there.
2. Funding is hard to acquire.
Why doesn't unity have it's own kickstarter/indiegogo/gofundme/fig system? You're a well known company, many people use your engine, and the public at large knows about it. Why isn't there an effort to push to help fund those using your engine to accomplish something? At the very least partner with one of those sites or help guide your customers to acquire that type of crowd funding. Epic is doing this with a $10mil grant.
And, I don't just mean making a video saying, "If you had funding, this is how you'd probably get it." Either provide assistants or create a webpage or app that helps guide the creation of a game design document, crowd funding pitch, provides a timeline for milestones of where your company should be along the way to hit their targets, production goals, provide marketing expertise, etc.
3. The community in unity connect itself is rather toxic; filled with naysayers, pessimists, and scammers.
You need to revamp unity connect entirely. It is barely salvageable as is.
4. The forums were good.
This was one area I felt shined.
5. Sometimes assets would try to release a new update and your store would block them for months. Other times assets would get deprecated or removed that still had life in them. The store also lags very badly, logs you out randomly, and is difficult to search.
Fix the store. And, make things more convenient for asset creators.
6. Planning and staying on track is also very difficult.
I'd also recommend providing a system similar to Notion, Hacknplan, and Slack integrated into your own site for gamedevs to build, design, document, and track content and progress. Don't overcharge for this. Also, importantly, provide a way for them to export their data.
If you can't swing that yourselves, again partner with someone who already has the infrastructure.
7. Your company felt very distant; like it exists simply to consume money and doesn't care if the customer succeeds or not.
Make your customers feel like you're with them in their struggle. Don't wait until they cancel to suddenly be concerned.
8. Time to iterate is so slow.
When I hit play the game should launch and simulate immediately, there's no excuse for the extremely long load times. Unreal shines here in comparison. This really slows down development.
I would suggest working on a rewrite of the editor that allows real-time runtime editing of content, scripts, prefabs, scenery, etc where everything can be saved / persisted without having to click Stop. In other words, you're ALWAYS running by default. This is how HeroEngine works for example, and it's really cool to be able to create an entire world WHILE the game is running. And, you can play it multiplayer with the other developers and artists while building the world and see collaboratively the pieces come together in real-time. While HeroEngine might not be one of your big competitors, it's worth looking at how they pulled that particular feature off.
There are probably more things that could have helped that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Hope that helps."
Addendum: It is also worth noting that Nvidia Omniverse allows the real-time editing that I recommended.
You can ask for a good faith billing adjustment. GCE or AWS is well aware that things happen, and collecting something is better than collecting nothing.
There's an enormous cache of historic SWFs hosted here [1] and it would be awesome if the Internet Archive could archive them, so they won't get lost. However, there are far too many to individually add.
My personal favorites would be the Demented Cartoon Movie [2], Weebl and Bob's transdimensional portal [3] (which is located under the stairs) and of course The End of the World [4]. They all load perfectly in Ruffle [5].
I believe part of this is because Dolby is suing Adobe, saying they mandate certain pricing requirements in the license agreements, and so Adobe has responded by pulling old versions of their software with support for Dolby file formats.
There are special no-activation-required versions of the entire CS2 and CS3 product line!
Adobe killed the product activation servers for CS2 products in 2013, and for CS3 products in 2017. For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This resulted in a bunch of press[0] about it being a /!\ omg completely free Creative Suite /!\, so for CS3's 2017 shutdown[1] they made you register your original serials to your Adobe Account in exchange for an individualized offline serial and the offline installer[2].
I don't know exactly when, but some time around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 they ended[3] the offline installer program for CS3, removed the ability to generate offline serials in my Adobe Account page or even re-access the offline downloads for my already-generated serials, and have seemingly scrubbed their Knowledge Base of any mention that they ever existed.
I am so thankful I got them while I was able to since aside from needing to tweak the high-DPI handling[4] the CS3 apps work beautifully on my Windows 10 x64 machine. All CS3 applications are only 32-bit, but they're also the final versions with traditional UIs before they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS4, so I'm fine with it :)
If you want to be sure it works in the EU I guess you could use the EUPL instead of AGPL which gives many of the same gurantees, but fits into european law.
If you define “political” in such a way that nothing can be “apolitical” then the word “political” completely loses its meaning. The whole point of any adjective is to distinguish between things. It’s a tautology.
Exactly correct. I tried to explain this to a public official from an east cost town who was flying back from the Bay Area trying to "learn the secrets" of creating an innovation hub. When I explained this situation (non-competes are illegal, stuff you do at home is yours) to him he literally said "That's crazy! Why would anyone hire anyone if they knew they could walk out the door to a competitor, or even to start a competitor? We would never allow that in our town."
I tried to explain that it puts the onus on the company to adequately reward their employees with equity so that they want this company to be successful, not the possible other company. And it encourages management to be a better place to work than their competitors. Both things lead to better employee engagement and better results. But they couldn't get past the fact that there was no issue with leaving a company and going into competition with it.
Ultimately I believe (but cannot back it up with any sort of data) that non-technical folks don't appreciate how much crappy work is involved in starting from a blank sheet and coming up to being competitive with an already up and running company. But what ever the reason, the unwillingness to "go there" with this sort of protection time and time again has killed innovation. Even when an example that it works, and works well, has decades of history demonstrating that it does.
The Control Panel in Windows 10 is now legacy, with most things now under Settings. Eventually it'll go away I guess, but some apps still install their own little control panel applets.
Either way, the best way to access everything you can do in Windows 10 is do it via the 'god mode' folder:
1. Create a new folder
2. Rename it to: GodMode.{ed7ba470-8e54-465e-825c-99712043e01c}
3. Open it
The 'GodMode' part of the name, can be anything you like tbh.
That's sad, many of them would have joined Mozilla not just for money but genuinely believing they are working for social good and they did.
I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of Firefox OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the ruthless, hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosystem where even Microsoft had failed.
IMO Mozilla should have gone full throttle on Thunderbird Enterprise with support structure, Something for Microsoft Teams equivalent and finally embracing DDG with open hands.
It's kind of weird to get this question when you lived it and there seems to be relatively little to Google.
I mean, it was all in the news, trade magazines, business journals. Blackmailing OEM's, intentionally breaking things and making them incompatible. At least the legal battles are documented somewhere and Wikipedia has something about them, but they were just the tip of the iceberg.
Dan Gilmour's articles in San Jose Mercury news from 90's should be somewhere.
Basically small software startups had to have Microsoft Strategy. They had to find way to stay out of Microsoft radar or MS would steal their work, their developers or block them. You sue them like Stack did and MS just stalls few years and pays few millions in damages. It was worth of losing in court to protect monopoly.
Big OEM's like Dell had to do what MS said or MS would up their price. It was straight blackmail from monopoly position.
A big part of this problem is "BSD license everything". Make your work Affero GPL, and charge for commercial use. Stop giving away your labor and expertise for free. Solidarity.
Below is a comment by someone commenting on Rossmann's video on the testimonies for/against right 2 repair laws. I found it quite illuminating so here it goes.
Silicon Valley has turned us into software subscribers. Now, they are essentially trying to turn us into hardware subscribers.
=============
Bless you Louis; you're doing important work. I think you need to widen the scope of your argument.
I've been working in Silicon Valley for Fortune 10 corporations for 30 years and I've been privy to "business model" conversations for decades there.
Here's my take (pardon the length): If you take a step back the essential reality behind what Silicon Valley corporations are trying to do, is disenfranchise consumers and abolish private property; more specifically and more importantly, the means of labor. They've already managed to pull it off for software; now they're essentially all subscribers. The current attitude as it pertains to hardware reeks of this being the intent for hardware too. Everything in software is SaaS today and the next step is to do SaaS for hardware.
They also see that this is a prevalent model in the auto industry : Most people don't really own their cars, they lease them and under the leasing contract all maintenance is done by the dealership. In general, the whole "sharing economy" (Uber and the like) is also going down that business model — you no longer own your means of labor; they're owned by the corporation.
They don't want consumers — and especially workers, to own anything — they want you on a leash, forever in debt, a brick in a huge Ponzi scheme where the entire life of the worker/consumer belongs to business model and you are nothing else than a credit line.
Keep this in mind when you argue the Right to Repair: It goes well beyond "repair"; it goes into the very fabric of what it is to be a citizen, a worker and consumer in a market society. Companies don't want you to repair what you purchased from them because they don't really consider you've ever acquired the goods; you're a hardware subscriber and they want you to be tethered to them as a dependent; a predictable source of revenue for a publicly traded industry that needs to predict revenue and growth each quarter.
How do you ensure predictable revenue when you're Apple ? You lock consumers in. What does "locking-in" mean ? Alienation, subservience, dependence. I'm not even a libertarian, nor a marxist, and there's no hidden anarchist agenda in my arguments — I simply believe in private property as an essential pillar of civil liberty.
If what this industry does is not "abuse of dominant position" and wilful distortion of market forces to benefit nobody else but tech industry shareholders, what is it ? If you've studied the past, you'll recall the economic model of plantation owners relied on the slaves/workers not owning the tools of their labor. You were strictly forced (or allowed) to work under the monopoly of the plantation owners. Ironically the same model was instated by the Soviets, although they pretended to make it legitimate by claiming nothing belonged to any individual. Both the Bolcheviks and the plantation owners abused their lucrative monopolies.
The foundation upon which the republic and civil liberties are built, is private property. If many in the tech industry have their way, the US will become one large plantation where a class of owners can shut you off your job, your communications and your access to education and culture, simply by remotely turning your devices into bricks. The hour is grave.
I have a fair bit of insight into this industry, both from friends, acquaintances, and family who use a variety of offshore structures to manage their wealth and from my own dealings (the company I founded and currently manage is offshored for tax and legal purposes).
What people don’t realise is that aside from a couple outliers offshore jurisdictions aren’t that shady at all and the major ones are usually under the protection and sometimes outright control of much larger and much more influential jurisdictions, with the United Kingdom being the leader here. If tax avoidance was as simple as just starting a business in a zero or low tax jurisdictions we would see a lot more of this kind of business being done in Africa (with the notable exception of Seychelles today) than the Caribbean overseas territories, but mature legal frameworks and more importantly reliable governments are incredibly important to both small time players who may stash some cash offshore as savings and large multinationals. If anything shady (civil unrest, wealth confiscation etc.) were to go down in the British Virgin Islands for example the United Kingdom has a nuclear option (as BVI is for all intents and purposes a Crown colony) to unseat the sitting government and bring order, which is incredibly valuable as an insurance policy.
Yes, it is possible to incorporate offshore corporations in less-reputable jurisdictions like Vanuatu or Seychelles, but doing business with these vehicles is next to impossible because no reputable bank in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Switzerland is going to want to have you as a customer if they don’t already know you due to compliance reasons. Without a bank account your ability to funnel and store money in these opaque conduits becomes rather difficult and there really isn’t any point any longer. Of course, there are small shady banks in certain jurisdictions (notably those that aren’t under indirect British control) that will take you on as a client, but then you run into the risk of them running away with your money or defaulting.
The money itself isn’t really
managed by or from these island nations/colonies either, and in the cases where there are nominee directors the beneficial owner will usually have a power of attorney as well as an undated resignation letter from the nominee director which effectively gives them wherever they are total control of the company.
What is interesting is that crypto is changing all of this due it being completely outside the severely regulated financial sector, opening up a ton of opportunity for small island nations to compete on tax efficiency without being subject to the quite frankly draconian rules that usually places them on US/EU/OECD blacklists which can create severe consequences for the economies of said nations through sanctions.
Very interesting times indeed, and I think we will see more and more companies (particularly tech companies) being offshored than before in the next few years.
Here's the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines document the article is referencing [0]
"Expertise" is mentioned 99 times, "authoritative" 55 times, and "trust" 69 times. Of course, tweaks to generate search results favoring websites that show expertise, authoritativeness, and trust are going to favor larger, more established companies.
Seems like News Corp shot the arrow and then drew an 8,800-word bullseye around it.
Bassist from venezuela, rhodes keyboard from greece, rapper from washington dc, rhythm guitar from finland, jazz guitar from USA, mastered by a guy in croatia.
My email response: "1. I felt that throughout my subscription that there was a lot of "do it yourself" and "here's a video." Some of that is fine, but there's a point at which it all feels a little money-grabby. You've paid for the subscription! Now pay for some extra lessons, assets, etc.
I would recommend extending personal assistance, e.g. assigning someone to be a studio's success guide that sticks around from beginning to end.
Also provide a job market similar to fiverr for commissioning logo, concept, 3d artists, musicians, sound effect, software engineers, etc. If you can't swing that maybe partner with sites like upwork or fiverr that can handle it. I'd actually recommend the fiverr model for art and content, it's more affordable in the long run. Upwork's model is better for developers or writers, though. Unity connect felt like walking through a dark alley in a 3rd world country waiting to be mugged.
You provided me with plenty of customer loyalty specialists to bother me to resubscribe after the project failed, but didn't support my efforts when I needed it most. The outcome could have been different if there was a support structure along the way that assisted in the different aspects of building a successful game company and product. That just wasn't there.
2. Funding is hard to acquire.
Why doesn't unity have it's own kickstarter/indiegogo/gofundme/fig system? You're a well known company, many people use your engine, and the public at large knows about it. Why isn't there an effort to push to help fund those using your engine to accomplish something? At the very least partner with one of those sites or help guide your customers to acquire that type of crowd funding. Epic is doing this with a $10mil grant.
And, I don't just mean making a video saying, "If you had funding, this is how you'd probably get it." Either provide assistants or create a webpage or app that helps guide the creation of a game design document, crowd funding pitch, provides a timeline for milestones of where your company should be along the way to hit their targets, production goals, provide marketing expertise, etc.
3. The community in unity connect itself is rather toxic; filled with naysayers, pessimists, and scammers.
You need to revamp unity connect entirely. It is barely salvageable as is.
4. The forums were good.
This was one area I felt shined.
5. Sometimes assets would try to release a new update and your store would block them for months. Other times assets would get deprecated or removed that still had life in them. The store also lags very badly, logs you out randomly, and is difficult to search.
Fix the store. And, make things more convenient for asset creators.
6. Planning and staying on track is also very difficult.
I'd also recommend providing a system similar to Notion, Hacknplan, and Slack integrated into your own site for gamedevs to build, design, document, and track content and progress. Don't overcharge for this. Also, importantly, provide a way for them to export their data. If you can't swing that yourselves, again partner with someone who already has the infrastructure.
7. Your company felt very distant; like it exists simply to consume money and doesn't care if the customer succeeds or not.
Make your customers feel like you're with them in their struggle. Don't wait until they cancel to suddenly be concerned.
8. Time to iterate is so slow.
When I hit play the game should launch and simulate immediately, there's no excuse for the extremely long load times. Unreal shines here in comparison. This really slows down development.
I would suggest working on a rewrite of the editor that allows real-time runtime editing of content, scripts, prefabs, scenery, etc where everything can be saved / persisted without having to click Stop. In other words, you're ALWAYS running by default. This is how HeroEngine works for example, and it's really cool to be able to create an entire world WHILE the game is running. And, you can play it multiplayer with the other developers and artists while building the world and see collaboratively the pieces come together in real-time. While HeroEngine might not be one of your big competitors, it's worth looking at how they pulled that particular feature off.
There are probably more things that could have helped that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Hope that helps."
Addendum: It is also worth noting that Nvidia Omniverse allows the real-time editing that I recommended.