1214
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
I'm starting to see enshittification as part of the cycle of renewal in capitalism. Don't get me wrong...it's a completely foolish and disasterous way of doing things, and billionaires are a black mark on society as a whole, but innovation happens when you take away the established tools.
Twitter is a good example. Elon seriously accelerated the enshittification, and now it's tanking. Meanwhile, alternatives are springing up at breakneck speeds to replace it. Which one will win the war is anyone's guess, but Twitter will be the loser regardless. Reddit is another one. And Digg before it. As one commits corporate seppuku, others step in to take its place.
While it sucks for anyone caught in the crossfire, and the ones responsible for nuking a corporate landscape often skip away with a golden parachute, it usually leads to a shakeup that can bring amazing innovations. The key is to get in on the next wave, hope you picked the winner, and make sure you get out before shit hits the fans this time.
But that cycle is bad for the advancement of society as a whole. Instead of having something others can build on, everyone has to start from scratch and redo a lot of the work that was already done.
Establishing new social networks for example take a whole lot of time. And then you tank them so others can do the same thing all over again? That's not progress. That's standstill being sold as progress.
Lol your mistake is thinking that these people care at all about "the advancement of society as a whole".
It's not a mistake to be optimistic.
But it is to believe that those in charge will be.
Optimistic is fine. I love it.
But don't be unrealistic and think the world works like that.
I'm not saying it's a good thing. In fact, I opened with the statement that it's not a good thing. But it just seems to be the way things are done, intentional or not. It's a constant 2 steps forward, 1 and a half steps back, but slowly we do make some progress. This is just an observation that I've noticed. I truly wish it were different, but that's just how things seem to unfold.
Specifically on Twitter and Reddit, this has led to a massive jump in federated social media. That seems like an advancement to me.
That point about social networks is true, but it's more of a symptom of the internet at large.
Running things on the web isn't free and most of the major innovation has stemmed from trying to hide that fact from people.
It started in the late 80s with donations to the guy that ran your favorite BBS. But that was not sustainable, so banner ads started showing up, but they didn't pay out enough. Then the pop-up and was born, but it turns out that people really hate those. So then they did away with them entirely, instead harvesting data about the users to sell to advertisers.
Now, there are basically 2 paths forward. Host your own microservices that connects to a larger network, widely spreading out hosting and storage costs across the userbase. Or, pay a subscription to access a service with the understanding that they won't advertise or sell your data.
Donations are somewhat sustainable because the per-user cost of having stuff on the internet is super low. So even at $1 USD per month any remotely successful service becomes wildly profitable. People just thought that banner ads would be yet-even-more profitable since they can be applied to everyone who looks at the site, not just regular users.
But not every user donates
In going to be dirt poor if I have to subscribe to every site I visit online.
But in that case, it would be best to do a subscription model of like $10-ish per year.
This would involve an agreement not to sell data, to collect only data with a use demonstrated to be critical to the operation of the service, and a plan to dispose of that data within X amount of time. This also needs a written contract stating that the cost of subscription won't go more than X% above the user's pro-rata share of the demonstrated cost of providing the service, consisting of certain very specific purposes (building, servers, ISP, employee revenue, etc.) to avoid cheating for more profit. A subscription service, protected against privacy infringement and price gouging (a profit limit).
If it's ever going to work this would need to be a government-mandated privacy act. I usually hate government intervention, but this is very much a necessary evil to prevent price gouging.
I only suggest this over donations, because realistically, after upscaling to a global audience, only 5-10% of traffic would be users that choose to donate, increasing costs to around $10-20/month, which yet again lowers the number of people who choose to donate. It stabilizes, but at such a low percentage that it's unsustainable at a large scale without millionaire donors, and a very small percent willing to pledge $20-30 ish per month throughout the entire product lifetime...
In other words: everything turns to shit.
Yeah, at least these dominant corporations are now being forced to compete and become profitable without the advantages of free financing. This process is revealing the ghoulishness that their exaggerated ability to outspend their competition via borrowed capital had been hiding from the consumers.