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.
A nice company has a great product and is well liked by its customers.
New executive manager comes in and thinks “how can I quickly get a huge bonus”? The answer always is implement new changes that will tuin the company in a year and a half, but that manager will have received his bonuses and is gone, leaving the company in ruins.
I can’t say 100% for sure that this is what happened, but whenever something like this happens, it’s just somebody deciding they want a quick buck
I dont understand how the board allows this behaviour, how do they not interween when an executive clearly is abusing the terms of the contract at the expense of the conpany
They’ve been collecting metrics for months and plugging them into spreadsheets to figure out exactly how profitable this will be, just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.
They knew it would be incredibly unpopular. They knew it would likely kill the company one day.
But the spreadsheet doesn’t care about any of that so neither do they. They sold off stocks then made the announcement.
When the changes go live, they’ll squeeze everything they can out of successful projects, who will be left in a position of “losing 50% to Unity is better than losing 100% from pulling the game”.
They’ll stuff their pockets with us much of that money as they can and when the spreadsheet tells them to, they’ll pull the plug and strip the company for parts.
It was the best thing for them and that was all that mattered.
Not to mention money can be made litteraly betting on the stock price swinging from the bad news. Calls and puts plan far enough in advance and automate/preset triggers via broker agreements and can even avoid getting nailed for the obvious insider trading a lot of the time.
They also made the announcement right after an iPhone announcement. Unfortunately, the iPhone was completely underwhelming, so the news didn’t get buried like they probably expected.
“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.”
Came to say this. Here in the AU you cannot exclude certain things, this being one of them. They can write it all they like into the TOS, but cannot be enforced. There are many examples, but basically no TOS/Warranty/T&C can exclude or explicitly deny any rights you have or laws that protect you.
Similar to warranty here. Many companies like to put “limited liability” and 30 day warranty. But in AU, the warranty has to fall within our laws. (for example Samsung saying warranty on a $5000 TV is 2 years. Well in AU if the tv is that expensive, you have the right to claim warranty on manufacturing failure for at least 5 years.) Many items we buy here, have an “Australia only warranty amendment page” stuffed in the box!
I honestly don’t understand the math of not releasing movies and un-releasing games. People say tax purposes but I’d think streaming is essentially pure profit, hard to imagine not being able to make 20% of your money back or whatever credit you get for taxes.
You clearly have no idea what a tax write off is. If you get 50$ profit spend 25$ on your business and pocket 25$ you pay taxes on your pocketed 25$ not the companies expenditures. That is a tax write off. A “company” doesn’t pay taxes.
The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.
My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.
The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.
A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:
I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.
So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.
You can’t write off expected future profits. That would essentially make income taxes meaningless. You can use a depreciation schedule for movies that you’ve produced and spread your tax savings out if you want(and you can avoid doing that by cancelling the movie all together and claiming it on your taxes now as a deduction), but that only matters when you’re actually making future money for the movie that you want to reduce your tax burden on. WB is losing a hell of a lot of money in the future to save money right now.
They are losing money on streaming. It was so bad that they took their cash cow HBO and grouped it with their streaming divisions to improve their financial report. WBD is making insane decisions because their #1 goal is to increase free cash flow to pay off their debts, whereas most companies’ #1 goal is to “increase shareholder value.”
You got the production company that pays $100 million to make a movie. The production company is owned by a studio. Production company licenses the movie to the studio that owns it for $200 million. But it’s all the same ownership and no money changed hands. It’s just on paper. So now the $100 million movie cost $200 million. Then the studio licenses out the movie to the marketing company, which the studio also owns, for $300 million. Again no money changed hands and the value is all on paper.
Do that a couple more times and that’s how a movie that literally cost $100 million and made $500 million at the box office “barely broke even”.
Might be off on the layers, but I heard that description of movie accounting years ago.
Exactly. I left that part off since I thought it was already a long description. But completely true. Can’t pay out an actor that takes a percentage if it never made any money on the “official” paper.
A big part is also residuals, they don’t want to have to keep paying actors, directors, and others involved with production, after the fact on a losing property. If there is zero income there are zero continued payments.
And as shit goes down because no one enforces corporate, the rest of us suffer the consequences.
When upper managemeny does stock selloffs before sabotaging the value of the company, it generates distrust in the whole market if they are not prosecuted. Traders stop buying and the economy goes into recession.
I mean I guess you could time it once like that, but if that’s your plan, you could have just sold it all a year before you planned on tanking the stock when you set up the schedule and make more money. Or just not tank the stock.
They are the reason WotC canceled all those in-development d&d games a year and a half ago. All WOTC published games were canceled because their CEO passed away and they scrambled to find a new one. This new CEO saw all these in-development games and canceled them in an attempt to save money, and with the Dark Alliance game released the year before, they felt there was no recouping development costs.
Overall a huge bummer. I would have liked to play an immersive sim d&d game.
I'd like to live in the world where multiple devs are making D&D games in Larian's engine the way there were a handful of Infinity Engine games 20 years ago. Replaying BG3 is great, but it would be nice to have new areas, characters, and calls to action while still having the freedom to just "verb a noun" the way you can in BG3.
Larian isn’t sharing it’s engine and I feel like even if it did, a lot of studios want the creativity of building their own thing. Not just another D&D crpg top-down isometric game. A lot of the D&D games in the works were unique and took interesting risks that might have paid off.
I doubt they would sell the engine but it would be nice if we had good modding tools and map editors like in NWN for example, custom maps and campaigns could keep bg3 alive for a long time - especially considering that they have no plans for expansions afaik
I think they were implying they like their instance but wish they could downvote sometimes. My instance doesn’t allow it either, and coming from more than a decade on Reddit, it can be frustrating at times. Still, I wouldn’t leave Blahaj because my interests align with those of the instance’s owners.
I didn’t even notice this comment until now. Looking at the comment I wrote late one night, there are tons more issues than that. Hell, I spelled ‘canceled’ with 2 Ls. I appreciate it though, reminded me to run my grammar checker.
I am just an annoying grammar stickler, friend. I assume most mistakes are from typing on a mobile device or being a non-native English speaker, many times both.
My most severe gripes are the misuse and/or overuse of words like “like”, “literally”, “aggravate” and “jealousy”, or when I see “would of” instead of “would’ve”.
In a couple hundred years, the precision in English usage I pompously strain to uphold will be antiquated to the point of incomprehensibility. I admit that dying on this hill is a fool’s errand.
This, the OGL, the Pinkerton incident, the continued decline in quality products. Talk about squandering the opportunity of a lifetime with the renaissance of D&D.
This practice feels like something that should be illegal. Effectively it is destroying art that hundreds or thousands of people worked hard to make, for the sake of fiddling the books of the owning company that commissioned it.
If you “write it off” to be worth zero, it should either become freely available abandonware, or can be claimed as the intellectual property of those that worked on it. Otherwise it is evident that there is some value to be had and therefore tax fraud to claim it has none.
You would have to have another law that says that anything significantly devalued must be able to be purchased for the stated value. Otherwise they will just say it’s worth $1.
It’s crazy that WB is getting away with blatant tax fraud. I can’t claim my house is worth $0 in order to pay no taxes yet WB can say, “This media is worth $0 for tax purposes.”
Back when WB threatened to block the release of a finished series on HBO Max (Summer Camp Island), the creator more or less threatened to leak it herself. I think most devs would feel the same. At least I would. Not like it’s making them any money either way.
I can just see their PR team last night planning to spin Unity as a victim after the death threat, in an effort to stop the bleeding, only to find out it was one of their own employees.
It is because the billionaires write the laws through ALEC. The only part of the system which isn’t working as intended is that they had to make any promises in the first place.
This picture is kinda wimpy. Zaslav had led the company through a total stock drop of almost $16 per share yet his comp has gone up almost 100% based on the figures I’ve been able to find. Granted he’s not getting the lucrative options he started with but that doesn’t seem to stop the other comp from going up.
polygon.com
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