It’s a reddit link, ik… here’s a copy of the post:
The truth behind the Unity “Death Threats”
Unity has temporarily closed its offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas and canceled a town hall meeting after receiving death threats, according to Bloomberg.
Multiple news outlets are reporting on this story, yet Polygon seems to be the only one that actually bothered to investigate the claims.
Checking with both Police and FBI, they have only acknowledged 1 single threat, from a Unity employee, to their boss over social media. Despite this their CEO decided to use it as an excuse to close edit:all 2 of their offices and cancel planned town hall meetings. Here is the article update from Polygon:
Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
Yeah if I were the CEO I would be avoiding a town hall like the plague.
He essentially just called a bomb threat on his highschool before a final he was going to fail. Then came home to his family crying about how scary it all was.
Yep, a lot of companies will make shit up to make people feel bad for them, and to try to make themselves seem like the victims in all of this while hiding the real victims when they are the abusers.
It’s honestly fucking disgusting behaviour, it makes me sick.
Yep it doesn’t surprise me, I’ve seen many people claim “death threats” to get out of responsibility for doing or saying something that was not respectable, or that was flat out evil.
They do this because it works very well, death threats are so serious and so scary that if somebody said they got them you would immediately give that person a pass (unless they’re a Nazi then they deserve it, you don’t give Nazis a pass for anything) no proof required, though it also would be incredibly easy to forge proof of such an event for anyone skeptical and it would be enough for 99% of people, the remaining 1% of dissent would then be written off as crazy people.
I’m willing to bet that this will continue to happen and people will continue to go along with it because there are enough cases of people making real death threats to innocence cover up the false ones and make them seem more real than they actually are.
Talk about blowing shit out of proportion. People need to realize that making death threats is a good way to make the bad guys look like the good guys.
Which is probably why the CEO made it up using the single death threat from an employee as an excuse to close the company for the day and probably also get pity from people for it (see here for more details).
I bet it probably won’t stay that way though, he’ll probably realize people are onto his lies and make some death threats from sock-puppet accounts and claim “No 4 reAl pEopLe arE sENdiNg m3 deAth tHreAts” I wouldn’t put it past him if people don’t keep falling for the current one, and if people keep the heat on him for his current bad decisions.
Well looking on the bright side. If death threats are starting to become common for the decisions that companies make then maybe WFH should also be common to protect employees. Can’t target employees at an empty office. The employees will have to be careful with social media however.
Hey! Don’t threaten people! Don’t hurt anyone! Just move to Godot. That’s it. Abandon ship, peacefully. These people care more about money than employee lives anyway.
Yes, retroactively changing ToSes to impose tyrannical taxes and fees that will bankrupt most users is, in fact, kind of a rare thing. The ruling class is usually a lot more subtle. And what they do is usually not so in-your-face that it is arguably illegal.
Have you actually looked at what they’re charging? Nobody is gonna be bankrupted. The pricing structure they announced guarantees the cut Unity takes is a tiny sliver of any developer’s revenue unless they’re literally only charging like $1 for their product in developing countries.
There are no victims in this story, and even if there were, what I said would not be victim blaming. Seriously, point to where I said developers were asking for it. You can’t because I didn’t, but you’re so high on your own farts you can’t read a single sentence without wildly misinterpreting it.
I find this and other comments like this hilarious because you’re 100% correct and yet at the same time lemmy is a cesspool of people on every post about an owner, or landlord, or millionaire/billionaire about killing them, or beating them, or bringing out the guillotine, or eating them, etc etc.
Again, you’re right. It’s amazing how tone deaf people are here though to not be aware their behavior reeks of the same extremism.
It’s why I’m very much on the fence about continuing here outside of the memes. The people here are disgustingly naive and not healthy quite frankly.
Idk why the downvotes. It’s seriously off putting to be surrounded by people that clearly have no idea how the world works. It was funny before Trump. Now I take these meme waves with a grain of salt. Idiots in large numbers are dangerous. At least reddit was easy enough to use that the cesspool was diluted with less intense morons.
I’m a landlord. Never evicted anyone. It’s a super high risk position to be in. My mortgage isn’t free. The upkeep to my property isn’t free. Time spent vetting renters so my neighbors don’t have to live next to crackheads isn’t free. You pay rent so you don’t have to think about maintenence costs, mortgage, risking allowing others to live in property you spent money you worked for on. All of that and any other subtly is lost on here. Going to work and enjoying it is possible. The world isn’t black and white. Communism doesn’t work on a large scale. Etc.
Where do I find one of those? Most communities with any traffic feel like they’re full of the same people with the same axes to grind, just talking about slightly different subjects.
More realistic outcome - some game loving tweenage hacker does something fantastically destructive in whatever part of their infrastructure they can get into.
nobody who makes public death threats is gonna do shit. why would you announce and make a public record of a crime you are about to commit? hashtag #bankrobbery? another joke of a corporate move, unless it’s a lie to get sympathy. Way overblown reaction for somebody just angry and probably talking shit.
feel like a beefed up law enforcement presence for a couple weeks enough to stop that if it’s just one person dumb enough to stroll in the front door with a facetiming iPhone and a .45, this seems like an extreme reaction for something that was probably not even a literal death threat to begin with.
I strongly recommend looking in to how this has gone down for a lot of Influencers and the like (since coders and journalists tend to be a lot more quiet about it). For all his flaws, moistcritikal did a really good video on this a few years (?) back regarding one of the bigger female streamers. He, of course, ruined it by treating it like a cool ass event when the stalker got arrested but…
The reality is that cops don’t give a shit. You can provide the details of the death threats against you and they will just say to call them if something happens. And even then, they will do their best to not get involved even while someone is standing outside your door. This is why, every so often, you hear about something like Gavin Free and Meg Turney having their stalker break into their home with a loaded weapon and either dying by suicide or cop. They had reported it countless times before but it wasn’t until the guy was forcibly breaking into their home that the cops gave a shit.
And there are plenty more situations like that which don’t involve two of the most public people on the internet who work for a company that will farm clout out of anything.
Like, back during the height of Gamergate, a very good friend of mine literally had to go into hiding because he was targeted by the mob for the crime of… writing a few articles. He, his wife, and their newborn had reported the death and rape threats to the cops repeatedly and even had a different friend help track down the sources of some of the more credible ones (let’s not go into details on how…) and provide a paper trail. Nothing. He was literally on the phone with 911 begging for help when one of the stalkers was standing outside his home with an assault rifle. Dispatch only even sent a cop AFTER they heard the gunshots on the call as the monster unloaded on their home. And guess what? Cops didn’t give a shit after the fact either and it was up to him to take his family and go into hiding for a few months before taking a new, much lower profile, job writing press releases.
For what its worth? His former employers wanted to go public with that. He threatened to sue them to hell and back if they did because all he cared about was keeping his family alive. And that is not an isolated incident.
sorry tbh I’m sure this may have been a legit point but this was too long of a rant for me to fully read. can someone tldr this for me?
I dunno this feels like some truths were stretched, if you call the cops with a man standing outside your house with an assault rifle they would definitely dispatch someone in any state but maybe texas
People are indeed stupid. There’s a reason the Mafia’s #1 rule was “keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.” If you’re going to commit a crime, don’t talk about it just do it.
Discuss, yes, but only verbally. And even then obliquely. “Take him to that spot, you know the one, over by where Leon used to work.” Stuff should never be written down because you’re just asking for it to turn up as evidence somewhere.
I hate humanity sometimes, why would they send death threats? Just don’t use their engine; this is the way you actually make a change – switch to something else, threatening people does not help you prove your point. I hate their new pricing changes too, but death threats are never warranted
I absolutely agree. I’d want to say those threats are people outside of the industry. People in the industry have received death threats themselves so they understand that it’s real shitty, right? I hope so.
While I’m not defending those who sent these death threats or justifying these actions, I’m sure a lot work and progress will be lost for many companies because of these outrageous changes. It should be no surprise that many if not all of their clients are gonna be angry. Switching to another engine isn’t like switching from reddit to the fediverse.
They’re changing pennies per install, and only after the publisher is receiving over $200,000 per year, and they don’t count the first 100,000 installs. The price goes down dramatically for customers at the higher subscription tiers. I don’t understand why people are so pissed about them wanting such a tiny cut for providing the software that does so much heavy lifting for game developers.
Their new pricing is not horrible, but it’s pretty wonky at best
After the first wave of outrage they had to clarify that it wouldn’t take reinstalls into account, which should have been clear from the beginning
Also the fact that they take money on a game install wether or not that install generated any money is just dumb, most people would rather pay more as long as they have the guarantee that they only pay AFTER having made some profits
Even with the qualifiers, it makes it super hard to make any financial projections as your profits are totally uncorrelated to the fees you’ll have to pay
First of all if you’re a poor (and possibly solo) developer who could only spring for the lowest tier you’re being charged the highest rate per install. That rate is 20 cents… per install… not per purchase… per install. If I buy the game once and install it on my desktop machine, my laptop, and my steam deck, the developer has to pay 60 cents. one of those computers breaks down and I need to reinstall the game, that’s an additional 20 cents every time. I have a young nephew who thinks nothing of installing a game to play for a day or two then uninstalling it to make room for another only to reinstall that first game again later. He does this with a lot of games… almost all of which are Unity games (I know, because he wants me to play these games with him quite often, so I see that logo pop up). Come January 1st, every time he installs that game, BOOM, developer owes 20 cents. My nephew isn’t special and, if he’s uninstalling and reinstalling games like that you can bet there’s 1000s of other kids doing the same! Hell, you don’t even have to be a kid. I might play a game for a few months, uninstall it, then reinstall it years later. That’s another thing… this 20 cents is perpetual! As a developer, what happens when you’re done with your game? You do have the time or energy to maintain the game anymore? This pricing model doesn’t care. You abandoned your game 5 years ago? Don’t care, 100 people installed your game, you owe us $20!
I didn’t realize they never “per install” quite so literally. That does make a big difference and it’s a really weird way for them to charge.
Edit: Ok so according to another commenter your interpretation is common but wrong, and Unity clarified they mean the first install per customer only. So my position that this isn’t a big deal stands.
Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs? We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.
So, again, if I install the game on 3 different devices, Unity considers that 3 installs. If I build a new computer later, then reinstall the game there, it’ll count as a new install. The scary thing is… what if someone hates you as a developer? They now only need to buy your game once, then setup a script to roll VMs and install your game on VMs (each VM counts as a seperate device), and you, as the developer, will be hit with the new install cost each time.
Additionally…
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.
The issue here is… the developer would already have been charged the fee for a “pirated” install, because, how is a developer supposed to even know their game was pirated in the first place. Here, the developer may already be financially hit for a pirated game and now has to spend time and resources with Unity to convince them that some percentage of installs are pirated installs. Earlier in their FAQ, Unity claims they do not have a “phone home” when a Unity game is run, so, how are they determining installs in the first place? “Aggregate data”… or, another words, “trust us”.
Im some cases I could see how this could destroy someone’s livelihood and people have killed over that sort of thing before. But my guess is that the people sending the death threats probably aren’t even developers.
What’s more curious to me is what kind of people are those that resort to such lows?
I mean they might have mental issues,yes,but it’s scary to see that people seemingly intelligent and able to create games (asset flipping not included) can have such low morals and problem solving capabilities.
He had easily treatable cancer if diagnosed early enough (which it was). He refused treatment, because he insisted on curing himself only using his exclusively fruit-based diet.
When that didn’t help (what a surprise), he finally caved and did try to get treatment, but by then it was too late.
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.
Or just don’t send death threats… what a bunch of petulant lunatics people are.
Disagree and express your disagreement, don’t use the opportunity express your violent inner child. You just distract from the actual issue you “care” about.
Big corporations need service contracts. If something in the engine is broken where it impacts the game in development, engineers are flown in to fix it at the customer’s site (if that’s necessary). That’s not something available with most open source tools.
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.
This only makes sense. Unity is a very big part of what makes a game work and building and maintaining the Unity engine costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the money made on a game. That share should ideally be proportional to how much money is made by the developer, which should be proportional to the amount of times the game is downloaded. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to pay any money?
Unity already charges money once you hit a certain revenue from your game, it’s only free if you don’t get a lot of sales.
More importantly, according to the article, when questioned it seems Unity hasn’t given any proper thought into this model.
If a user installs the game and then uninstalls and reinstalls, it counts as 2 installs that must be paid for. Not only is that unfair, it can lead to abuse. Angry with a change the developer made? Uninstall and reinstall 30 times (automate it) and you will actually cost the Dev money.
What about pirated copies? Unity will still “phone home” and the result will be a developer paying for 1mil installs that he earned nothing from.
What if your game is free to play?
There were some other issues like that mentioned too (in the twitter post in the article).
“This only makes sense. Ovens are a very big part of what makes food and designing and building the ovens costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the food made in the oven. That food should ideally be proportional to how many edibles items are made by the chef, which should be proportional to the amount of times the food is baked. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to give away my baked food?”
Does a pizza contain an oven? No. Does a pizza contain tomatoes? Yes. Therefore tomatoes are an ingredient and an oven is not.
Does a game contain Unity? Yes. Therefore Unity is an ingredient.
The game ships with Unity which handles the rendering, physics, sound and a whole bunch more. Basically Unity is a pizza base, but it gives you a bunch of toppings too. The developer combines the base with the toppings and voila you’ve got a game. Not saying that last part isn’t hard, but a business model where Unity, or any game engine for that matter, is charged proportionally to the amount of installs isn’t a totally unreasonable business model.
I agree with the essence of your post, but the part about Unity already charging devs proportionally based on sales is not true. The editor is currently licensed per-seats and there is currently no cap to how much money you can make if you run the enterprise license, which is 5k/year per employee.
By that logic Microsoft should also be able to charge for any software installation that happens on windows. That also means any and all installations for the customer should be single use, because now all installations cost money.
Would you be willing to pay a certain amount of money any time you want to install some software, doesn’t even matter if you’ve already paid for it? Because that’s the business plan you call “sound”.
Yeah, you can call that stupid, but I am not stupid. But regardless of your insult, let me talk to you.
I am not sure which Microsoft product you are talking about, but certain Microsoft products are indeed charged this way. It is called an OEM license and while typically every OEM license is negotiated on different terms (per license, per revenue, per download, per install, per duration of usage, etc.), the basic idea is usually that some amount of money will be made by Microsoft proportional to how much use your product is getting. In the Enterprise world it is also common to charge by how much value the user is getting out of the product, which whole sales departments are trying to figure out on a case by case basis with complicated excel sheets. I mean, it is not like Unity invented this model. In fact, Microsoft got as big as it got by selling a pay per copy version of MS-DOS to IBM.
Unity is an ingredient that makes games work. The game is made with Unity and is shipped with the Unity engine packaged inside, just like any other ingredient. So explain to my why Unity can not define some metric which will highly correlate with the amount of usage and charge based on that metric?
So what I get from Unity’s site is that they will charge per download. So yeah, potentially you can download a game three times to three different devices or even to the same devices you’ve wiped. But I would claim that generally speaking the number of downloads is a good indicator of how often a game is used. If you don’t like a game you are generally going to download it only once. If you really like the game you are likely to download it again and again to new devices and after wipes. It isn’t perfect for sure, but every other metric you can come up with also has a fair share of problems. Maybe you tell me which one is the one that does not have any problems and is still simple enough to bill upon?
I am not sure which Microsoft product you are talking about, but certain Microsoft products are indeed charged this way.
Windows. If Unity is a large part of what makes games work then Windows is arguably an even larger part of what makes most consumer software work. If it’s acceptable to charge for Unity usage then it should also be acceptable to charge for Windows usage. After all if you want to install Unity development tools on Windows you need to use Windows. Then following your logic that means Microsoft should be able to charge, in this example charge Unity Technologies, every time someone installs the Unity development tools because the tools literally won’t work without Windows.
And if this became the norm then that cost will be offloaded to the customers. That would mean if you’ve built a new computer and want to play Skyrim you’re going to pay x amount to install Chrome (or Firefox), then pay another x amount to install Steam and finally pay another x amount to install Skyrim. That’s stupid.
Maybe you tell me which one is the one that does not have any problems and is still simple enough to bill upon?
It’s called licensing and Unity developers already pay a licensing fee per year and, in theory, also per user. Some companies reuse keys (not unique to Unity or game dev) between developers because they can get away with it as just the “per user” part is already too hard for licensing companies to properly track and bill.
And to be clear I never said you’re stupid. I said your idea is stupid. Smart people can have stupid ideas as well.
Yeah, so Windows is indeed a large part of why software works, but it is infrastructure which is packaged separately. Your reasoning can be extended into even further absurdity, like we should pay Intel each time we run software, etc. But this is just not how Microsoft and Intel operate. They’re not part of the product, but just make the product work. It’s not like we get another Windows version and Intel chip with each game.
Think of Unity like a frozen pizza bottom. What the developers needs to do is put some ingredients on top and it can be sold. The frozen pizza is clearly sold with the pizza bottom. Should the developer not have to pay per pizza bottom? You can bake the pizza in your oven, but the pizza developer doesn’t need to pay for the oven. They can assume people have that in place; it is simply a requirement in order for the pizza to be consumed.
However, if you are going to ship a Microsoft product as part of your product, you can sure as hell expect Microsoft sales people on your doorstep. They’ll negotiate an OEM deal and it’ll surely depend on things like: number of installs, number of downloads, number of users, time used, value extracted by the users, revenue made by you, etc. I’ve ran a big company for many years and did a number of OEM deals during that time (both being OEMed and OEMing). This is only reasonable.
So, the leadership of Unity is a complete piece of shit, but death threats (or really, any other threat of violence) are just straight up idiotic. It’s a game engine company. There are much more fun and interesting (and, you know, legal) ways to kill the company in a commercial sense.
I feel bad for the regular workers there who can’t choose the direction of the company and need that job to live.
But frankly if they were all directed just to the CEO, I couldn’t be less bothered. Wealthy assholes don’t have empathy, don’t listen to reasons, aren’t bound by rules. Even lawsuits today are decided more by who has the most money than who is in the right. Maybe it’s not so bad if folks put some fear in him, specifically.
Sure, there are more worthy causes to direct that sort of outrage to. Then again there’s the livelihood of a large number of smaller creators to consider. This isn’t just about a fictional thing not being the way someone wanted.
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