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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Yeah, inflation rate is high, so central banks are trying to counteract that by basically slowing down the economy, so that our normally scheduled inflation countermeasures kick in appropriately. Well, and the usual way to slow down the economy is to make it more costly to loan money, i.e. increase interest rates. Which means investors can't just pump money into any company anymore, they want that money to actually pay out to cover those interest rates. And that means companies need to actually be profitable to get money to finance their operation.
So does that mean all these businesses were always doomed to fail anyways, just living on borrowed money/time, and now the bill comes due, they’re all fucked?
Kind of. In the past investors were willing to be more patient, and company values were artificially high, because they were based on potential profits rather than actual profits. That's shifting a bit as interest rates go up.
Simplified: If you can borrow 1 Million USD for 0% apr and earn 1000 USD with that, you have 1000 USD in profits. Now change the apr to 5% and you are 49,000 USD in the red.
Eh. Most of these companies were profitable. Just not seeing the exponential growth that the stock market dictates when interest rates are high. Unity, not so much, but its revenue was always fine, its just a really poorly run company. Who knows where they piss the kind of money they are pulling in to.
Welcome to capitalism.
A lot of the wealth created by venture capital and the service economy were only ever possible with the help of what is essentially free money. With the increase in interest rates and the collapse of a major venture capital bank, those corporations dependent on low interest payments are going to collapse as well.
As interest rates climb and venture capital dries up, the companies who were just scraping by, or dependent on debt loading during development have had their runway cut short.
We are getting to the point where companies aren't going to be utilize fronting a huge amount of debt as a strategy for long term growth.
Unity looks to be one of the companies who wanted to utilize the slow boil tactic perfected by the likes of Google or Amazon. Where they front the cost of tons of free and convenient services, hoping that companies become dependent on them, slowly creating fees over time until they become profitable.
If I were a guessing guy, they've hit the end of their run way, and have failed to secure a new injection of capital sufficient enough to make the payments on their loans. Likely their options have come to find a way to make your payments, or you'll be giving your entire operation to a bank.
I'd guess that companies that failed to turn profit when money was cheap are most likely doomed. However not all of the hype companies are like that. Some could be barely profitable, but shareholder pressure might push them to heavier monetization practices.
Barely profitable? Even massively profitable companies indulge in rent seeking behaviour. Line must always go up!
I find it interesting how common it is to blame executive greed/stupidity, as if we all merely got super unlucky when companies were picking their CEOs. Every CEO is different, yet the outcome is almost universally the same: when company longevity and quarterly profits come into conflict, profits win.
The CEO of the modern public corporation embodies that conflict of interest, which is perhaps why they are so hateable -- the job is inherently two-faced -- but at the end of the day they're just a face, a name, and a bundle of core competencies. No matter how many CEOs we go through, there will never be one who could satisfy the unending hunger of the public stock market. You will never find one who is not ultimately enthralled. The fundamental concept of know-nothings owning everything is just outright broken.
I don't know if I think we should burn it all down, but one thing I'm sure of is that the problems won't stop until we bring the people with investment money into close alignment with the long-term interests of the corporations they own (and/or oust/eat them)
This would make sense if Unity increased their fees, but it doesn't make sense to invent a new revenue stream based on a metric you can't even accurately measure. That's profit-seeking.
I'm guessing it's their last ditch effort to remain in good solvency. A board member making trades before a big change is almost always a sign of the rats abandoning the ship.
Why can't they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though? It's the same boilerplate terms other engines seem to make ends meet with. There are many different ways to correct course in the scenario presented, but the action taken doesn't suggest that's the scenario they're in. Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
Likely they've been remaining solvent through private equity, which has probably dried up. Their fees were probably just enough to entice further investment, but most of these companies operate on paying loans with new loans until they can become profitable in the long term.
Usually when a price hike that doesn't make sense happens, it's because they've failed to get a new injection of capital to remain in solvency. So they have to speed up the fee schedule to make their payments to the investors.
It's a public IPO, they don't have to be profitable, they just have to appear as if they will be profitable to increase share price. This kind of hike is not something that a public IPO would do as it will assuredly drop stock price, which is illegal unless there is no alternative.
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can't see how the charges could even be considered valid legally, let alone pull them out of insolvency. A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn't have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge. I don't think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that's happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock. But the point is it won't work without a monopoly they don't have - they'll have to go back on it (at least with regard to games already released), or end up in costly litigation
Ehhh, it very well might not be. But service providers have an awful lot of control of their platforms and who and how they allow access to it, and for how much. A lot of the interpretations in IP courts when it comes to the digital service seem to be about 5 years behind the actual industry. Add on the fact that a lot of the people running the IP courts barely know how to operate a computer, let alone the ins and outs of digital media and we usually get an environment that's skewed towards the industry.
I think it would be interpreted pretty close to what reddit did with their API access. Technically it's just a different type of service fee, and it's backed by a pretty simple logic of offsetting the cost of the involved traffic.
The main sticking point would be that you would have to prove that there is a logical path to long-term profitability that surpasses or offsets the resulting devaluation of pursuing a completely different profit model.
I think it really depends on how big the devaluation will be at the end of everything, and if they loose large clients specify their reasons for leaving.
It's all pretty complicated, but Im still guessing theyre having solvency issues, just by looking at their IPO price since the last quarter of 2021 they've lost about 50% of their value without any real signs of recovery.
It's not really an intricacy of IP law though, it's kinda one step away from a contract saying "I get to write a blank cheque from you to me. Don't worry, I'll put in the right amount you owe, and if you don't think I did just tell me and we can talk about it. I reserve the right to say no though"
To legally charge the dev, an invoice has to be raised. That's a legal document, there's an item on it, a quantity, and a price. If the details of the invoice cannot be verified by either party, it is invalid. About as fundamental a principle in contract law as you can get, I imagine.
The way it's different to reddit is that Unity wants to charge per installation on unique hardware. That is, if you buy a license for the game, and install it on your PC as well as your Steam deck, then the devs need to pay 2x install fees.
It is in the fact that the game was built on their platform using their IP. They may own the game they created, but they don't own the right to distribution, that's a service.
That's if you are doing product business, the service industry has more flexibility in their terms of service and how much they can charge for it. The option is typically to discontinue the service or to pay for continued service.
Right, and as a service they will claim that additional downloads are an responsible for the loss of additional revenue, one they wish to offset to the customer who created it.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, just explaining that the service industry has a lot leverage in court.
And I'm going a step further to say that's not actually a defensible argument. The distribution is a distribution of game licenses with associated terms, and those terms don't dictate a limit to the consumer on the number of installations on hardware they own for private/non-commercial purposes. For Unity to argue additional installations per license represent lost value is an argument against the terms of the licenses, not the terms of their arrangements with devs.
Lost revenue obviously isn't the reason for it, anyway. It's almost certainly due to technical limitations of their data collection method resulting in them not being able to associate unique installations with their associated license. So the reason devs must accept a degree of inaccuracy that inherently favours Unity is that it would be illegal for Unity to be accurate.
Right, but it's not unity who is selling the game license. Nor are they limiting the end consumers ability to download the game as many times as they wish. They are just charging the dev for the use of server space and traffic.
The arrangement with the devs is literally the only thing they have control over.... it's a service based company. Services are allowed to change their terms whenever they want, you don't own access to their services, you pay to access them. If they change their terms of services and you don't agree, you stop paying for the continuation of service.
TOS agreements are for the benefit of the company, not the benefit of the consumer. You can sue or arbitrate over the TOS, but it's primarily only successful in cases involving negligence that harms the client e.g a leak of sensitive data that makes someone loose an important client.
I think that's quite an assumption...... servers cost money, sending a large amount of traffic through them cost money, it's pretty standard for service companies to increase fees with increased server usage.
If I were a guessing guy, I would imagine that being able to track unique downloads would be kinda important for a gaming dev service.
And it's most costly to increase interest rates not because those directly affect the investors, but because those interest rates affect the borrowers since the borrowers will need to make more and more money to be able to pay back the initial injection + interest.
If borrowers don't think they can pay back, then they probably won't borrow in the first place. If they do borrow but don't make enough to pay back those loans + interest, then the investor loses out.
And if borrowers don't borrow in the first place, then investors sit on their money when they could theoretically inject it into other businesses so they can earn on what they own, and not just let their assets stagnate (or decay). To investors, this might also be perceived as a loss.
Do I have that right?
In principle, yes, although two things to note:
Borrowing isn't always the active part. When a company is listed on the Stock Exchange, then investors play the active role by buying or selling their stock.
Most investors don't just have tons of money laying around. They have property, which they can list as security when borrowing money from banks. And then they lend that borrowed money to companies seeking(/allowing) investment. That means:
a) With high interest rates, investors do have a need for their lent money to pay out, too. As do the banks, because they borrowed it from the central bank.
b) Ultimately, lots of money will be given back to the central bank. The money is effectively removed from the economy then. If you've ever heard that inflation comes from too much money being in circulation, that's how that ties back in.
I'm no expert either, though. I'm just summarizing what makes sense to me and what I've learnt from making this post a few weeks ago: https://feddit.de/post/2514573
Oh I see, so it's like a merry-go-round, and everyone wants to have their money returned with more than they borrowed so that not only can they have some left over for themselves, but to also pay back those they themselves borrowed money from in order to lend in the first place. Recursive lending/borrowing up until the central banks, like you said.
Risky stuff. If any single entity along that lending/borrowing chain/network flops, it can send shockwaves to everyone else, all the way back to the central bank.
Thanks for the 2 cents.