just drafts

From a conversation at PocketGamer.biz:

Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with—they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.

That’s CEO John Riccitiello answering to criticism with regard to Unity’s recent merger with ironSource.

For the rest of the conversation, Riccitiello builds his giant strawman of developers who “don’t care about what their player thinks” and equates this strawman with everyone who doesn’t embrace Unity’s publishing model that is driven by, let’s call it by its name, advertising and addiction.

One of the anecdotes with which he fleshes out his strawman:

I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.

That’s not just strawman-nonsense on so many levels; it also tells you everything about the mindset behind it. I’m well aware that “compulsion loop” has become an industry term in the mobile games sphere that has replaced “gameplay loop,” the term we still use when we want to make games that players can enjoy. (Ferraris, according to Riccitiello.)

Just to refresh your memory, while the gameplay loop or core loop* consists of a sequence of activities or sets of activities that the player engages in again and again during play that defines the mechanical aspect of the playing experience, the compulsion loop is a behaviorally constructed, dopamine-dependent, addiction-susceptible, near-perpetual anticipation–avoidance–reward loop as an extrinsic motivation package that keeps players playing to maximize their exposure to advertising or their willingness to spend money on in-game purchases of both.

That’s what Unity’s business model is about, industry term or no.

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* To maximize confusion, there’s also the game loop, which is the piece of code that updates and renders the game from game state to game state.

Kotaku:

Layoffs have afflicted Unity’s offices across the globe. […] On Blind, the anonymous messaging board commonly used by employees in the tech industry, Unity staffers say that roughly 300 or 400 people have been let go, and that layoffs are still ongoing. […]

Unity has been a “shit show” lately, one person familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, told Kotaku. Attrition. Mismanagement. Strategic pivots at a rapid, unpredictable rate.

Two weeks prior, apparently, CEO John Riccitiello had lied in an all-hands meeting that they wouldn’t be laying off anyone.

What’s more, there has been a flurry of acquisitions lately, most recently digital effects studio Weta for $1.62b and Parsec for $320m, while investment into creative ventures all but dried up. The only creative team who’d been working internally on a game was fired as well.

And then there’s this:

This project that Unity debuted this year, aimed at improving users’ knowledge of Unity, improve tooling, level up creator skills, that was fun and inspiring, that a lot of people were looking forward to? Everyone in that team picture has been fired. https://unity.com/demos/gigaya

I always had my reasons to distrust Unity deeply, and indicators for a smoldering fire under the hood have been there for a very long time. So if its C-suite now is officially a coterie of lying weasels, maybe we should rewind to about a year ago and take their protestation in this matter with the tanker truck of salt it deserved all along.