okay the pricing changes were stupid as fuck and should be discussed and criticised, but death threats are on a completely other level and not acceptable. So calm the fuck down whoever is posting them and I really hope those dipshits will get caught and be dealt with in a proper way…
Not even, it was a single employee (probably for reasons not even related to this change) and CEO used that as an excuse to close for the day and probably to make people feel pity for him and therefore more likely to give him a pass for these awful decisions.
I’m not one of the maniacs making threats of any kind, but honestly it really seems like death threats are the only thing that gets any attention anymore, so I can understand why it’s done…
Is “eat the rich” not a death threat in its own right?
There is no meaningful difference between a threat and a warning. I’ve never understood why we see that retort so often when someone asks “is that a threat?!”. It’s the same damn thing.
It is, and here’s the thing: All of society, laws, and legal recourses ultimately just boil down to “might makes right, but with extra steps.” We all love to act like this isn’t the case in a civilized society, but it is. That might usually rests with the police, the military, some governmental organization, or some megacorporation. Violence both literal and metaphorical is inflicted on the common person continually by those at the top. Who are the police after all? Just guys with guns. Who are judges and politicians? Just guys with access to the police. Who are megacorporations? Just guys with access to judges and politicians, and so on down the line. So when someone says they have the law on their side, and you don’t, what they’re really implying is that they can call the guys with guns, who if you don’t do what they say (no matter how ridiculous) can literally kill you. And we treat this as normal and proper and reasonable, because we’re stupid.
These motherfuckers want to act like their only their violence or threat of violence is justified, and that’s it’s a one way street.
Well, it ain’t. Nobody’s invulnerable.
Maybe it’s “just” video games. (Or “just” a cell phone app, or “just” a predatory subscription, or “just” an apartment with exorbitant rent, or whatever.) But big corporations are fucking with people’s livelihoods, here. There’s a reason we colloquially call such a thing “a living.” These are assholes taking food off of someone’s table, just for greed, just because they can, because they think they’ve above reproach. Because the whole teetering facade is lopsided. It doesn’t matter who the fuck they are at that point.
Call me whatever you want but Im happy the people who make these bad decisions from their insulated lots in life have to face at least some kind of consequences now, because the law is explicitly set up so that they typically never have to. Sucks that it comes to this but its behavior analysis 101, if you dont introduce consequences for undesirable behaviors, you’d be an idiot to expect change.
I don’t love that it’s probably caught up a lot of people who have nothing or little to do with it though, but the guys at the top need consequences or nothing will change, and beggars cant be choosers.
Frankly that doesn’t sound honest. Especially when picture of guillotines are sent by the same crowd. Even more considering that wealthy people are not going to volunteer their wealth through reasonable debate.
Apparently this might have been created recently, even though the phrase goes back at least a few hundred years. Here’s a transcription of the one I was talking about though:
“We are starving. There is no more bread, and we have nothing to eat.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t work for your bread,”
as if he did not snatch away the grain by his own greedy hands and create filling bread for his own overflowing mouth.
The poor cried,
“We are dying. There is no more medicine, and we’re all ill.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t take care of yourselves,”
as if he did not buy all the medicine and raise prices so high
Yeah, it’s not like voicing disagreement and concerns amicably is listened to. It’s not like these executives negotiate with the users before making decisions that can ruin their livelihoods. As the avenues for civilized protest close, as people are left powerless towards the decisions of the wealthy, what else can they be expected to do?
It might seem much when it comes to games, but it’s also a matter of worker’s rights. Sometimes it seems like people today are a bit too passive and overly concerned with civility as their rights are undermined. Comes to mind the other news about the Australian CEO saying that he thinks more people should be unemployed and feel pain to be reminded who they work for. What is the appropriate response to that?
Death threats are not OK, but this can destroy years of work for people, and it can threaten their livelihood. I’m guessing this has pushed some people into a sense of desperation. And these threats are acts of desperation, not threats that have a huge chance of being carried out.
John Riccitiello needs to be fired, if he isn’t Unity deserves bankruptcy for this move.
Ever been in a game forum where the players pretty much worship the developers as if they were gods? It’s way too common. Those people can get crazy protective when they make it part of their identity.
Despite that, I doubt gamers are very involved in payment methods of game engines, or even know which game engine their games are running on.
So unless some VERY popular game developers have been out saying expansions for their favorite games will not be released because of this, I don’t see the mechanics for what you claim working at this point.
Actually, they are talking about canceling silk song, and expansion for hollow Knight that has been in development for ages now, simply because they are looking at the possibility that the game will have to be delisted in order to avoid bankrupting the developer
Depending how it’s implemented, gamers are absolutely impacted by it.
Some of the chatter is that even already-released games would be subject to this change, meaning a lot of devs might pull their backlog to avoid going broke on a game they put out years ago and is now free (or heavily reduced). Or games that have always been free, now the dev has to choose if they want to charge for a historically free game or pull it completely.
This is dev hostile, but it’s also consumer hostile.
Maybe you know, but what happens if a dev pulls a game and someone still has the installer and installs the game? Are they going to charge for that still? It makes not sense to me.
Unity clearly didn’t think this part through- probably because they never intended it to do anything but rake in money as the company dies. They never had a real way of precisely tracking downloads, but they want all the info so they can decide how much to charge. So would they charge on a local installer? Almost certainly if they could find out it was used.
There already Indie devs that are talking about delisting their games in order to avoid paying Unity fees they can’t afford.
This contract changes criminal, especially since it punishes the developer for no fault of its own. Sometimes I have to reinstall a game multiple times in order to figure out why it suddenly doesn’t work. I’m not the only one, that’s going to rack up fast.
And if you think review bombing is bad now? I imagine people buying the game not to leave a negative review, but you run a script that continuously reinstalls and uninstall the game.
They could bankrupt any developer they wanted to. Hell, it might not even be the gamers, if a company with a game on Unity doesn’t want to make it epic exclusive, Tim Sweeney has the choice to just continuously reinstall that game in order to sink any company that doesn’t play ball
See my other comments, it was neither. It was a single employee at their company. Not sure how long that’ll stay true though, especially when it comes out that he made it seem like there were death threats being sent to him when it was a single employee making threats. Probably just so he could close the office.
Oh I’m willing to bet that Disney and Nintendo are getting their most expensive lawyers. Keep in mind, there are a lot of Marvel and Star Wars games out there, the mouse doesn’t like to share his cheese.
Unity is actually quite a popular engine for a lot of games both 3D and 2D and on multiple different platforms. It’s very popular among indie developers, though there are actually quite a few games from Big publishers that are released under unity as well.
Which is why he probably used it as an excuse to close the office, when the only known death threat to occur was from one of his employees.
I don’t know who that employee is and I don’t really care point is he’s using that basically to get pity from other people and distract from the bad things that his company is doing right now.
Don’t underestimate that shit. I’ve personally got death threats before. People are dumb as fuck. I’ve seen people actually follow through. Life is fucked up. Everyone’s batshit these days.
Yeah, not only will people send death threats, but they'll send them to random people they see on LinkedIn who happen to have the company in their bio.
Instead of, like, to the CEO's house.
Because too many people are both angry reactionaries, and also cowards.
I will absolutely take that bet. Given both how unpopular the decision is combined with it being even tangentially related to the gaming community I would be astonished if they didn’t receive death threats.
Knowing how despicable the worst of the gaming community can be, I have no doubts that death threats were real.
I also have no doubts that the despicable CEO, like others of his ilk who receive entirely justified negativity for their stupidity, will milk it as an excuse to dilute the negative feedback and shift to victimization.
It’s because of loose definitions of “death threats” and the fact that when you piss off millions of people a couple of them are bound to tweet “i hope u die” at a ceo
I feel like they could have realized that having their employees sitting around discussing how much their Csuite fucked them probably wasn’t doing them any favors. On the other hand that would also represent a degree of awareness they haven’t really demonstrated a capacity for.
There are some rumors floating around that employees did try to stop this before it went public, but they failed. I agree that they can’t do much now anyways.
Gamers and death/rape threats. Is there a more iconic combo?
But yeah. Most likely this is just stupid kids. But need to take everything seriously because you never know when it is actually going to be a real threat.
I imagine this policy will quietly be pulled with a statement about how due to “not expecting how unpopular the decision was”
As soon as they get a subpoena from… every AAA developer.
This would include Warner bros, as they own a video game Studio, in fact I believe Mortal Kombat 1 uses unity, and it’s supposed to be what gets their Christmas bonus this year. They would be fools to not already have their people on the case.
Any time a gaming company does something stupid, leave it to gamers to out-stupid the company and prove that they deserved to get shit on in the first place
Despite it’s illegality. it’s a type of protest. Better that being pissed off in twitter and the still cucking to unity in the end, but worse that just stopping using unity and porting existing games off the engine. Still, not everybody can still just do that, this is why something like this is understandable. Imagine being a indie dev team years in development with mounting costs and backers expecting a product and you expecting return for your work and then unity turns ups the leeching and fucking up your calculations and forcing you either to delay the launch, pay the financial cost of that delay, port to a different engine and learn a new skillset for that engine or bite the bullet and pay. Also Imagine the unity devs who will be out of a job because of this.
If you want to to change something then yes. A empty performance that the target can ignorance is worse than doing nothing, because then you falsely think “you at least did something”. ESPECIALLY so if all other methods are exhausted or unavailable to you and situation is a a great importance to you.
Illegality of methods does not make the cause unjust, since many unjust things in this world are completely legal and will get you imprisoned or killed if you oppose them. The most extreme example of illegality vs injustice was that in 1940s Europe it was highly illegal to protect jews from being hunted down and killed.
So now you are saying that threatening to kill people because their executives made a decision you don’t like (many Unity developers are coming out and speaking out against this) is “just”?
And… that people who have a problem with death threats being thrown at people for changing a product are equal to the Nazis?
I’m not saying I would be justified yo make death threats about this, since as you say this doesn’t really concern me personally and I have not made any. I’m just saying that people who get hurt by this have the full moral right to do this if they go down that path.
Also I’m really not buying this “Even greedy leechlike corporate suits still have the right to feel safe when doing decisions that will fuck over countless of of live and make society all the worse for it” line of argument that you are pushing between the lines. Violence is not just when somebody bleeds, you know and this is just response one one kind of violence with other type of violence. And this is not just a provider charging for a product. Many people get hurt by this and years of their lives might go to waste. And for what? Corporate greed, it’s not like unity is fucking struggling themselves and they need the cashflow. What they needed was bigger margins.
Ooh, think of the Unity’s corporate suits. You monster. they are people too. Think of their sleepless nights over this. They might have to go to therapy…
You really just base you sense of justice on legality. You really would just watch as landlords increase rents for 200% just for greed and watch people go homeless and then feel smugly superior when you condemn and report said homeless for throwing shit in the windows of the landlords. A Tennant might even have the chance to move elsewhere. Unity devs might not have such a easy path out.
You really are a awful person without a heart. Call me a psycopath all you like.
And you can’t see that violence is not just when somebody bleeds. Also you really can’t imagine that anything that isn’t legal is a justified action to a wrongdoing.
just wondering, what is your opinion of Palestine struggle against Israeli encroachment and occupation of their lands? 😜
If you are comparing a third party library changing its monetization model to israel’s systematic persecution and ethnic cleansing of a people then you are either a child or have the moral compass of one.
It is also incredibly disrespectful to the Palestinian people. Just like your previous Godwin’s Law invocation was immensely disrespectful to the victims of The Holocaust (and the general racism and bigotry throughout the world).
If you are comparing a third party library changing its monetization model
If you starting point is “it’s just money lol”, then beside your general screwed sense of justice this is another major problem in you thinking. Many people have made it blatantly clear that this is not just some price increase that devs can just wave away. It can cause cost of millions to devs at worse and that’s bad if you have a tight and fixed budget and you are years in development. It’s also a breach trust that will make nobody want to use unity ever again and that’s bad when people have sometimes invested their lives in it. That’s bad for Unity too yes, but it’s bigger that just one company. I have already told you this and why I sympathise with the devs.
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