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!

"✨Vulture capitalism!✨"

I agree

Unfortunately, i have been talking to my colleagues a lot about all this junk. we fundamentally don't trust unity any more. Depressingly, we realised the only way we could ever trust them again is uhhh, if Microsoft bought them.... lol.

Not the Entertainment and Devices Division which owns and operates Xbox. That's a total no go. Its gotta be the Developer Division, which owns all the devtools and curtally .Net. I think they need unity to be healthy, as part of the .Net ecosystem. IL2C++ is probably the second biggest .Net implementation by install base. Consolidation sucks but uhhh, i hope they buy it. fuck

I have absolutely zero details about what went down at the Unity offices today, and I sincerely hope everyone's okay. I think the company is making violent and ruinous decisions but (and I shouldn't have to say this) death threats are bad and aren't going to get the company to change its mind.

The news has got me thinkin' about how we got here, though. And I've built this (entirely baseless and fictive but arguably credible) chain of events in my head that hits like every shitty thing happening in the gaming and tech spaces right now. Basically:

• The mid-2020s enshittification* of every tech platform hits Unity, resulting in their terrible new monetization strategy
• This prompts game devs, obviously angered and taken by surprise, to make public statements about how this will harm them - including some that are a little tongue in cheek.
• This gets credulously reported by a failing games journalism industry as actual news, because no one is paid enough to do actual reportage that reaches out to a game developer and anyways that listicle written by an AI and cleaned up by you was due an hour ago, buddy.
• These news stories reach gamer circles where what was sloppy reportage becomes full-on misinformation on web forums and especially on TikTok (check that out - 50k+ likes on a post that lists a nuke next to a bunch of beloved titles). What was "Dev threatens to pull Cult of the Lamb on Jan 1" becomes "Every Unity game will stop existing in three months."
• Some toxic teenage gamer (or perhaps mid-20s irony poisoned chanlord), absolutely convinced that Unity is coming to kill Among Us/Marvel Snap/Genshin Impact/Cult of the Lamb/Pokemon/Rust/whatever calls in a bomb or death threat to the Unity offices. Or maybe they posted a picture of a bunch of guns they may or may not own to Facebook along with some threatening statement. I don't know/care what the details are, the point is I think that's how we get from there to here.

And like... it just feels like a very 2020s set of problems? From failing journalism to social media platforms rife with misinformation to undealt with gamer toxicity that's been festering since 2014 to privately held infrastructure we have relied on for over a decade suddenly deciding they want to be untenable solutions in the name of private equity it's... it's all there.

_{* Yes, I understand that this isn't really enshittification. It isn't an open platfrom that is now pivoting away from growth to revenue generation and thus making the product itself worse, it's a company that went public and then immediately lost most of its value and the dipshit know-nothing management is leaning into the F2P business because it's lucrative and they don't care about traditional game dev. But given its role as critical infrastructure that is now unusable due to the needs of capital, it feels enshittification adjacent.}

feeling left out. every single other company is announcing the stupidest, most hostile shit in the world today to try and bury it under the apple event. i wanna announce something stupid and hostile too. let me know what y'all would like to see. some ideas i'm floating include "publicly executing eggbug" but i'm open to suggestions here.

why would jae hold me at gunpoint and force me to draw this

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?