Honestly at this point I feel worse for the guy who made the threat than anyone else. Can you imagine what is like working with those sort of bosses with such exploitative tendencies and an utter disregard for an entire industry? They get to ruin countless lives but if anyone gets mad that’s the unacceptable one who is punished.
The number of people being ruined is pretty different though.
I get it, it’s a callous attitude, but I’m wondering if going for civility above anything else is really working out. I’d love for such situations to be settled with a reasonable discussion, but do they ever?
Because a threat is not an attempt…but saying “I’m gonna kill you” is not the same as actually trying to kill you.
Obviously, but you don’t ignore it either. You don’t wait for a DUI to crash before doing something about the threat. Say you’d like to shoot the president and see if the secret service ignores you.
You said that he didn't kill anyone because he got caught first. Which implies that if he didn't get caught he would have actually killed someone.
They really aren't the same. It's a common fallacy on the Internet to lunge straight to the worst possible case and equate that to whatever it is you're arguing, but it really isn't the same. Sure, the secret service won't ignore you if you say you'd like to shoot the president. But will their reaction be the same as if you've smuggled a gun in to a press conference and are spotted actively moving to get near him? Obviously not, because what I said remains true. Simply saying "I'm gonna kill you" is not the same as actually trying to kill you.
It might have been wiser, but seems to me we got to a point we should be thinking of the circumstances.
Besides, that only would have solved their individual problem, IF they even managed it. The way the company is being run would remain the same. How it would impact all the people who rely on that engine would remain the same.
It’s “never acceptable” to threaten someone, but intentionally ruining countless people’s livelihoods is “nothing personal”. Something is off about that.
It is, but all we have right now is Unity’s claim that this is what happened. We don’t even know the content of the threat, who made it, why they made it. All of that context could cast this in a wildly different light. I am very suspicious of Unity the company’s motives here in saying this when we haven’t heard from anyone else.
They absolutely do when it benefits them and they think they can get away with it, I don’t know how you could make such a blanket claim without questioning yourself just a little bit.
And of course it would be negative, but I think there’s a chance the claim casts a negative light on the company, and not on the employee, who is as yet unnamed. As it stands now, any of the following could be true:
The entire story is fiction, made up by Unity to distract from literally everything else about them. Distractions are massively important to companies at times like this, and it’s almost like clockwork that you find them making up distractions when they can’t find a way to put a good spin on the press.
There’s a real employee who posted something on social media, and it was a death threat. The death threat was about the current news. Bad employee, hope they see some consequences. I am doubting this right now because we don’t have any actual evidence of it, and because of point (1). Furthermore, the vagueness of this press announcement and the fact that “you wouldn’t know him, he works in another state” gives them cover . . .
There’s a real employee who posted something negative on social media. It was not a death threat, and is being deliberately misconstrued by Unity to allow them to deploy point (1).
There’s a real death threat posted on social media by someone who sucks. That person is not, in fact, a Unity employee and the announcement to the contrary was either deliberate misinformation or a simple mistaken identity. IDK what this would say about the company, but gamers can be real shitty. If this one is the case, I hope that person sees consequences, but they probably won’t.
There’s a real post on social media framed as a death threat, deliberately planted by someone at Unity to create a distraction, see point (1).
There’s more, and quite frankly it gets tiresome to see people jumping to defend when ploys like this have been the playbook for shitty companies since the invention of the company. I don’t know which of these things will be turn out to be true, but neither do you, and it’s so boring to see someone claiming they know the facts here for sure.
Unity employees have extraordinary working conditions and pay. It sucks that their hard work gets tarnished by stupid executives and poor PR but let’s not paint the employee as a victim here.
A fair point. None of the news articles even give us any real, meaningful details as to what happened so we don’t know if it was just execs who were threatened or if, perhaps, there was a bomb threat or something. I wish we could see a screenshot of the actual threat so we could make a determination.
Three years ago after trying Unity for a month I chose to learn Godot instead. I see now how right that decision was. Well done past self. Have a future cookie.
Leave one out overnight and tell your present self that they can have it in the future if they do x before tomorrow. If you succeed, then you get a cookie. If you fail, eat the cookie anyway. At least you tried.
For me the rule that has always worked is “bet everything on open-source”. It has always paid off.
When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python. I moved to linux as soon as I could. I never wanted to learn anything MS or Apple specific, or proprietary technologies such as visual studio, excel, vba, c#, SAS. I went on docker ASAP…
Now the world in my field runs on open source tecnologies, and I am the leaders of the “new stuff” wherever company I go.
On the long term learning open source solutions is always a win. Best case scenario it becomes the industry standard, worst case scenario it gives you the know how to master proprietary tools
I was completely unaware! I haven’t been keeping up with the .net / c# ecosystem mostly because my job doesn’t make me. That’s both good and bad, I guess.
When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python.
Good move. MATLAB is trash.
I never wanted to learn anything MS… …or proprietary technologies such as… …excel
Eh, depending on your career Excel is worth a tiny bit of time given its pervasiveness and how powerful it is. But like you say, learning open source will make Excel a piece of cake.
My experience is very different. I know a lot of c# developers, they are locked, even if c# now looks open source. They are locked as a mac user is locked to mac. C# is the most monopolizing language I know. Usually people know more languages, they easily move from one language to the other, from one programming style to the other depending on the task, they can easily learn different tools, different ways of doing stuff. All c# developers I know seriously struggle to move out of their conform zone, that is visual studio. To the level that many even struggle with vscode. And the way of doing things of visual studio is usually good for windows but it is the worst when doing more “modern” things, from ai to kubernetes
That’s a good rule. I only accidentally got into open-source, but now that I know what it is and what it’s all about, I am totally sold on it and will almost always choose open-source over proprietary alternatives.
I don’t use excel other than as a glorified calculator. I don’t use word as well. My department knows and I am pretty open when I do interviews. If the job requires to open more than 1 file Excel every 2 months, I am out. If I need to open a single excel sheet with VBA, they wasted my time.
Excel is fine, is what people do with excel that is not fine
What do you use for spreadsheets, libreoffice? I could see not liking a specific program but I love a spreadsheet and use them constantly. I use libre for ideological reasons but don’t find it as convenient for certain tasks as excel or google sheets.
Preach it! One of my colleagues writes all his machine learning code in Matlab. Brilliant person, has done some incredible research, but can do anything with the code because no organization is going to bring Matlab into its clusters and pay for all the licenses needed to run it. So while plenty of presentations and papers have been written of this research, the actual process of letting people use it takes an additional army of Python developers to translate and test every new feature and enhancement.
This is what happens when you build your career around walled garden platforms. Inevitably, you’ll reach a dead end. Focus on learning tools that enable you the most. Open source will always win in the end, because it will never come with this very heavy piece of baggage that proprietary tools have. This is why the internet is built on Linux and not Windows.
Unity is the same way. When you build your career on a technology that a single company can strip from you on a whim, that’s a big risk. I really hope that Godot and other open source engines take off after this. It will be a painful transition for many developers, but hopefully it’s a lesson very well learned.
The best devs in XYZ language/framework aren’t the ones who are experts in XYZ, but the ones who are just good enough in XYZ and 15 other things that they see what XYZ excels at, and lacks, and how patterns from elsewhere could be adapted to supercharge XYZ’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.
I’m curious why you chose R as an alternative to Matlab instead of Scilab. Scilab is specifically designed to be a free and open source alternative to Matlab.
For my thesis I was writing some test software and when deciding which language to use Matlab was immediately ruled out due to the cost (and also the extra cost for the toolkits I’d need). I instead went with Scilab which now means that anybody wanting to reproduce my results can do so freely.
Makes sense, thanks for the response! It is kind of fun to have a mix of the higher level (like R/Scilab) and lower level (which I used Fortran for mine).
I had assumed it was a fabricated threat that came from “inside the house.” Now it looks like it was a real threat from inside. I can’t condone what the employee said, but I can sympathize with their plight. Not to mention that of all Indie devs whose workflows have likely been uprooted by Unity’s selfish move.
“The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you… but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive.”
I don’t know who needs to hear this:
Unity sucks, but death threats are not okay.
If you really want to stop shit like this, vote in progressive legislators. So we can codify the fact that corporate actions influence more ppl than just the shareholders and their actions should reflect that.
Edit: thanks everyone for correcting me. I meant not okay.
…Or maybe they mean threatening death itself— As in, like “Stop killing my friends, Death, that’s really not cool, and I’m going to start stealing your Death-beers from your Death-fridge if you don’t stop”.
Answering more to the spirit of the comment, just voting is not really cutting it. Even when progressives are voted in, most of them are too hesitant to defy corporate interests.
Of course, death threats for if a game is not as good as someone wanted is just ridiculous, and generalized death threats involving people who have nothing to do with the decision is a psycho attitude. But this? A disgruntled worker worried about their livelihood, directing it to the people in charge? People who casually find fit to destroy countless careers to get a little bit more money? I find it hard to blame them.
I don’t think “regular employee” should be used anywhere close to this story lol. Imagine your passion project being building something for someone else and when that gets upset you resort to death theeats against your employer? Jesus.
Edit: Lol when this story first came out the consensus here was that death threats were not cool, now that it’s an employee everyone is sympathetic? Alright, let’s spin this story to fit our bias, why not!
That’s ignoring voting though, which is a good way to get the average sentiment of a community regardless of who is doing the commenting. Is it more likely that the community’s average opinion of death threats flipped overnight or that the new information changed the average opinion?
Either someone hates to see their company burn to the ground and responded in an extremely immature way, or a higher up went "let's get this public town hall canceled in a way that people feel sorry for us. SIMMONS! MAKE A DEATH THREAT NOW!"
The former seems the most likely, but I always hold out hope that it's middle management being a dumbass as corporate's gonna corporate
The CEO and his cronies don't understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.
However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it's dominance among other things because it's an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would've otherwise had trouble getting into development.
It’s not so black and white though. Passion jobs are often exploited because people will put up with it more and there is higher demand for those types of jobs.
Your best bet is to find something that is interesting and nice enough to keep you content and not bored to death but not so enthralling that you feel like working unpaid overtime or what ever. Bonus points if it’s paid relatively well.
Oh, I imagine working conditions there have gotten worse in recent times, too. The kind of leadership that fucks over their clients like this don't start with those clients. They treat everyone as a resource to be exploited, and employees are the ones they can abused most readily.
The public furor over the pricing model is the opportunity, not the motive.
We really need to make this a thing again. Not only for software but for anything. And we need legislature to enable us.
Don’t like how the banks treat people? Make your own. In the USA you need 12 million capital to even open such a thing. Since 2008, the banks have seemingly no competition from new banks (source www.upflip.com/blog/how-to-start-a-bank).
One could say that you‘re not allowed to take any of your hard earned money out of the company until you reach those 12 mil capitalization.
Last I checked, you don’t need nearly as much to open a credit union, I think in the hundreds of thousands. But I agree, the barrier is way too high for banking.
I’m not sure what this has to do with a game engine though.
I‘d very much appreciate if you didn’t assume what I wanted to achieve with my post.
To clarify it for you:
I think this unity thing is horrendous
It obviously is part of the enshittification pattern we see everywhere
I feel like this goes far beyond tech
I never wanted to „come across“ a certain way. I‘m autistic have a very different perception of things. My goal in a post is to inform or get informed.
Maybe this helps to clear things up. Feel free to correct things you think are inaccurate.
Godot as an alternative raises some interesting questions. Are there substantial benefits to Unity over Godot? And how many outraged software developers would we need to bridge that gap?
This is the problem with the shareholder mentality that’s ruining a lot of products and services. They don’t give a damn about the longevity of the company. They only care about money now; and as soon as things go sour, they’ll sell their shares and move on to the next company.
I picture it as taking off in a plane full of their employees and customers, and climbing as high as possible. Then, as soon as the engines stall or fuel runs out, the execs casually jump out and pull the ripcords on their golden parachutes.
There should be law forcing major players in the market to commit for 10 years + when they buy shares above a certain threshold and when those 10+ years pass they should be forced to justify when selling. Might be dumb but just saying as things are the market/system will just rot on the daily. Shits corrupted to the core imo.
IPOs usually come out with something like that, investors who commit to not sell their shares for half a year or maybe a year. After that… it’s each one for their own.
I know that execs have time windows they have to be in to buy and sell their stocks, and it has to be planned months in advance, but a massive TOS change like this doesn’t happen overnight or without buy in all the way to the top. They absolutely planned this, and I hope the SEC nails their asses to the wall over it.
yeah I’ll admit i don’t know much about how all this stufd works, but thanks to others i also found out about these rules. But imo those time windows are absolutely useless in preventing insider trading if they plan to do both things in the same time window anyways
I’ve been working on an indie game project for several years now and invested thousands of dollars into it. Fortunately, I had the foresight to use Godot for it, but if I’d used Unity instead I’d be completely screwed right now. Hell, I’m still using the 3.X branch of Godot because I figured that migrating everything to version 4 would be more trouble than it’s worth. Going to a completely new engine at this stage in development would be completely out of the question.
No, it’s a commercial release. I’d been doing everything with placeholder art throughout most of development but I’ve recently commissioned some artists for some professional assets, and I think I’ll have enough to put together some screenshots and a demo video and get a page on Steam, etc. set up within the next few weeks.
It’s a Metroidvania with influences from cinematic platformers (Another World, Flashback) and immersive sims (System Shock, Deus Ex.)
I’m sorry to stifle your expectations, but if you’re working on that project on your own, you’re very unlikely to reach the 200k/year revenue necessary to trigger this new pricing scheme.
I bought the game for science cause it was the only game so far using all major features of UE5 and is a good reference to see how they manage asset, etc to keep the game running at 60fps with provided spec.
I think it does have potential, the mechanic is tight enough(the kbm default binding is not good, needs some rebind to make the combat flow more fluid), frame pacing is smooth majority of time(you have jitter mostly when it switch between cutscenes<->game), pretty much checked all the boxes and doesn’t feel lacking when playing the game.
BUT, it does have poor marketing plan and kinda bad luck in releasing window. It’s a good “alt shooter game” IMO.
It also requires EA's always-online DRM like the recent Star Wars Jedi games. Steam needs to make that notification bigger so I know not to buy that sort of trash.
You mean denuvo? I think it’s a money sinker now so might as well remove it at this point. But it’s EA’s call. Also, yes I have to download EA’s launcher as well.
And EA's launcher requires an active internet connection. Try playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, because I sure did, and it doesn't work. There may be a way to sidestep the launcher, particularly on older games like this one that had the launcher retrofitted into it after launch, but regardless, it tells me to stop buying EA games.
I generally avoid denuvo and EA. I literally break this stance just to see what they did with UE5 but ended up enjoying the game as well. It sucks cause denuvo means I can’t hook up RenderDoc and see how they render a frame compare to stock UE5. The movement reminds me a lot of original Quakes(very close to Q3) where you can have lots of control mid air and really snappy movement speed with their mechanics(blinks and grapples). But yeah, if this game doesn’t have this “use all UE5 latest tech” tag I will probably not even know or touching it cause I don’t play shooters after like Battlefield 3. Cause I am old and I like fast arena shooter not modern slow pace CQB/battle pass shooter, I was quite disappointed after trying Halo Infinite. But, that said, any shooter fits my criteria, would probably fail in sales. ^^;
lol, I go take a look, yep, battlefield 3.(note, I have no idea when I added crysis, it’s probably from a bundle or something and it redeems directly. I had high hope when crysis 2 released. ) And yes, I did played 2042 open beta cause we had a company game day that picked the open beta.(and yep I don’t like it. )
Like which type of shooter is your thing?? For me it’s the quick arena/team shooter, my good shooter example would be Q3 and Tribes 2. I think it’s really satisfying when moving quickly and shoot people with actual projectiles, rocket/disc launcher in my examples. (not a fan of hit scan type)
Not quite Quake speed, though I enjoy Quake just fine too. For me, the sweet spot was stuff like Halo, 007, Metal Arms, Half-Life, Crysis, that sort of thing. But yeah, everything these days is an online-only, live service battle royale or extraction shooter.
On one hand, I applaud EA for at least attempting a new IP this time around instead of churning out yet another sequel, but on the other hand, damned if Immortals of Aveum didn’t look like the most generic thing out there.
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