Lotte 'just an idiot' May

EDIT 2023-9-15: added a couple of events regarding unity's military contracts, and fixed the ToS timeline which was MASSIVELY incorrect. there's a lot more i wanna add, so stay tuned.

• August 2020: Unity announces the filing of a registration statement for a proposed IPO (Initial Public Offering).
• September 2020: Unity begins trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange.
• August 2021: Unity employees express deep ethical concerns and the lack of transparency about the company actively pursuing contracts with the US Military.
• November 2021: Unity spends $1.6 billion to acquire Wētā Digital, a company that exclusively works in pre-rendered high-end VFX, in order to convince Wall Street that they're down with the metaverse. Seriously.
• June 2022: In light of the rapid decline of Unity's stock price between the end of 2021 (~$191) to mid-2022 (~$37), Unity CEO John Riccitiello assures employees that the company is not in any financial trouble, and they would not be laying anyone off. This was followed up 2 weeks later with ~200+ employees being laid off.
• June(?) 2022: Unity quietly deletes their GitHub repo that was once used to allow developers to view previous versions of their Terms of Service, which was previously critical as developers only had to worry about the ToS that was in effect at the time of game publishing. Keep this in mind for later.
• July 2022: Unity cancels their only "AAA" sample game project "Gigaya" (within 4 months of its initial announcement, no less), because they think that actually improving the engine by putting it through a full AAA development cycle is a waste of time.
• July 2022: Unity spends $4.4 billion to acquire ironSource, an in-game ads company that was well-known to be the developer of InstallCore, a wrapper for software installation bundling responsible for tons of adware/malware distribution.
• July 2022: Almost immediately following the outrage surrounding Unity's acquisition of ironSource, CEO John Riccitiello loudly and proudly calls game developers who do not consider monetization "fucking idiots".
• August 2022: Unity partners with CACI International in a 3 year, "multi-million dollar" contract to aid in development of "Smart Human Machine Interfaces" for the US Military. Yes, the US Military. Again.
• January 2023: Unity lays off another 284 employees, for "streamlining" purposes.
• April 2023: Unity updates their Terms of Service, which no longer includes the clause allowing developers to stick with the ToS they published their games with.
• May 2023: Unity files a form 8-K, laying off yet another 600 employees.
• June 2023: Unity jumps into the AI-generated content hypetrain, introducing Muse and Sentis. Unity also makes zero effort to assure developers regarding the legal uncertainties AI content has, nor to explain what data their AI systems are trained on.
• September 2023: Over 150,000 shares of Unity stock are sold by various Unity executives (including CEO John Riccitiello) over the course of 3 weeks leading up to Unity's upcoming pricing change announcement. (EDIT: there's a possibilty that this is just regularly scheduled sells. i gotta dig into it a bit further)
• September 2023: Unity announces changes to their pricing plans, which includes a "runtime fee" based on game installs and the previous 12 months of revenue. This change applies retroactively to every game ever made in Unity, resulting in mass panic in the game development community, forcing many developers to pre-emptively delist their games in protest, and/or fear of the massive debts to come. They also discontinued the Unity Plus plan, making the next best thing Unity Pro, which costs $2,040/yr per seat, only 5x the original price of Unity Plus at $399/yr per seat. No big deal, obviously.

did i miss anything?

I do trace basically every bad decision made at unity over the last 5 years back to either doing the IPO or getting ready to do the IPO, but this timeline starts WAY before 2020.

• October 2009: Unity Technologies closes a $5.5 million investment round with Sequoia Capital, Diane Greene & David Gardner
• July 2011: Unity Technologies closes a $15 million investment round with iGlobe Partners, Westsummit Capital Management & Sequoia Capital
• September 2015: Unity Technologies closes a $25 million investment round with iGlobe Partners & Sequoia Capital (AGAIN!?!)
• December 2015: Unity Technologies closes a $62.7 million investment round with iGlobe Partners & Sequoia Capital (AGAIN AGAIN!?! wtf!)
• July 2016: Unity Technologies closes a $181 million investment round with iGlobe Partners, Max Levchin, Westsummit Capital Management, Thrive Capital, China Investment Corporation, Sequoia Capital, FREES FUND & Dfj Growth
• May 2017: Unity Technologies closes a $400 million (ALMOST HALF BILLION??) investment round with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners

I remember being at a xfest (the xbox developer conference) around the time when the xbox one came out (so like.. 2013?) and having lunch with some Unity people, one of them was talking about a recently closed round of investment that had happened and how that cash was mostly just sitting in the bank. They didn’t really know what to do with it all. I remember them saying that at the time, the business was mostly sustainable from licence sales, so they didnt even really need it, but they would figure something out. (This was before the subscription model was introduced, we were paying $1500 per platform per seat, for a perpetual licence).
That was a real no OH moment for me. The second they took a single penny from investors that made the path to going public inevitable (or a sale, which could have happened but didn't). The investors need their exit eventually. They need their blood. The second that the first round closed, trying to make this a sustainable business was over.

We were on this trajectory from the start imo. Capital is the reason we can’t have nice things!