> A gaming engine just really doesn't seem to fit that mold.
if it had been unity or unreal engine, would you have changed your opinion?
if it had been unity or unreal engine, would you have changed your opinion?
The guy above you responds: "But these game engines had very high upside."
And you respond: "But those game engines didn't need high upfront investment. And none really do, you can make them cheaply."
That wasn't the point of the guy above. His point is, "There may be enough upside to building a really good game engine." The hypothesis of this company is by spending a lot of money building a really good game engine, they can get upside like Unreal. Whether or not that hypothesis makes sense is entirely a different discussion than: "Is there enough upside to justify this hypothesis", the question at hand.
Ruby on Rails was extracted from the creation of a website, basecamp. Once they were done creating it they realized they could extract a new framework out of it and did so.
This has multiple benefits.
1. profitable from the get go 2. design geared towards solving actual problems
What the person above you is saying is that the Unreal Engine was created in the same manner, whereas SpatialOS was not. And because of that, the risk was much lower.
While it is true that those things happened with Unreal Engine, it was sideways from the discussion that was occurring, but presented as a refutation. Risk has nothing to do with the comment two tier above me. I'm just pointing that out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIYKmos3-s
The idea that risk isn't a part of the discussion about why a company is laying off 40% of its work force doesn't seem like it has much merit.
The responses made sense, and they've been explained to you. You're just casting about trying to come up with some way to dismiss the other persons point while intellectualizing it for the HN audience. If we were on reddit your tone would be some passive aggressive wiffle waffle about experience or intelligence.
The tone might change based upon the site, but the inaneness of the person behind them doesn't.
> if it had been unity or unreal engine, would you have changed your opinion?
To me (again, to me. You could have a different interpretation, that's fine), the conversation was no longer about Improbable. It's about VC. The guy above him is arguing that a game engine does not have long term payoffs to justify the investments Fair got. But if they had made Unreal Engine, maybe it would have been worth it. It's not a bad comparison at all- Unreal Engine was made in a non-risky way, but if they HAD made it in a risky way, it might have been worth it to do.
> The idea that risk isn't a part of the discussion about why a company is laying off 40% of its work force doesn't seem like it has much merit.
When I commented, we were three degrees of separation away from Fair. So while this happened on a post about Fair, I just didn't get why it was relevant. But I see how my tone could have came off as dismissive. In truth I would rather have seen people debate the quoted comment, which is interesting, but the discussion got sidetracked, and I was trying to bring it back to the main point- I see how it could have been seen as dismissive for sure.
Your comment kind of bugs me. It's one line of content and four of person attacks. You've said that the responses have been explained, but you spent way more time insulting me than explaining. You said my tone would have been condescending if we were on Reddit, but you directly insulted me multiple times, and we're not on Reddit. Read your comment back to yourself. How would you feel if you received that? Are you proud of saying that to someone? I seriously don't think I said anything pointless. Even if it was pointless, there are way more respectful ways to say it, I was feeling down today and you made me feel worse.
Contrast with something like self-driving cars, which do require unbelievably massive upfront investments and still aren't solved satisfactorily yet, despite the investment of untold tens of billions of dollars that no one has yet recouped a cent of.
> Are you proud of saying that to someone?
well my days of dismissing you are certainly coming to a middle.
Imagine if my spent my time caring about someone who chose to patronize me.
> I was feeling down today and you made me feel worse.
good! Perhaps you'll adjust your behavior.
But $500mm is a tremendous amount of money to raise pre-revenue, which would really only be appropriate in an area with tremendous barriers to entry. Gaming physics, AI, map generation, etc. all seem like exactly the kind of thing that you can break apart into smaller pieces to get to market quickly and iteratively.
It's not like a molecule that needs to through Phase 3 trials, or a rocket which needs to make orbit, or something with a huge CapEx component. Even rockets can scale up from computer models, to scale models, to rough prototypes, etc.
SpatialOS isn't really something that can be built as a series of libraries a la carte and individually proven. It's an opinionated and tightly integrated approach to solving a very difficult problem, and the entire point is the turnkey platform. Either it's ready to build notable games on, or it's not.
Further, Improbable wants developers to pull the trigger on spending millions or even tens of millions developing titles for the platform. Investing this much in a platform that fails is an existential crisis for a games company. There's no way your half built SpatialOS game can run anywhere else.
Therefore, confidence is key, and raising an eye watering amount of money is basically table stakes to be taken seriously.
Whether it's worth solving a problem that can't be broken down in viable independent chunks is another matter (I have no interest in that personally). I'm not saying I'd invest at that valuation either. But it's certainly not as straight forward as you seem to be claiming.
IBM didn't see MS coming, MS didn't see Google coming, Google didn't see FB coming, etc.
The beauty of this is that things look done and then someone see a new niche and it turns out it wasn't a niche, but something millions of people wanted.
More generally, just because Unity and Epic are worth more now, doesn’t mean it would have been a good idea to pour money in back then. Hindsight isn’t an actionable heuristic.
Your point may be true. I don't think it's a $500 million point to prove, but I also haven't looked at SpatialOS enough to take that stand.
Ultimately investors in some of these research projects don't recoup their money. They used to do it because it was the prevailing culture of the day, e.g. see Xerox PARC or Bell Labs. Today it seems they have to get tricked into it.