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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?
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.
Yeah, this is basically why I’m not buying these arguments against a struggle of any kind, just because methods of it are illegal.
Illegality =/= your cause or methods are wrong
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?
Well here I thought it was a metaphor, but if you’re down for literally eating the rich I guess us steves gotta stick together
Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!
Is “eat the rich” not a death threat in its own right?
Maybe it is but I always took it as “let’s take their money and redistribute the wealth.”
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.
That’s the idea. Here’s hoping they get it.
That’s a warning tbh
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.
Threat in criminal sense requires that subject of the threat is identifiable…
Who is the rich in that “threat” above?
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.
I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t developers sending death threats but “gamers.”
Why would they do that? They are not directly impacted by this. Developers losing years of work have much more reason to be super angry.
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.
Nope, but I can imagine that to some degree.
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
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
Which game devs are they? I want to know which games I should buy now before it’s too late?
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.
There aren’t a lot of Unity Disney games out their, I would struggle to name any. And there definitely aren’t any Nintendo ones.
Actually some of the newer Pokemon games are in Unity, and Disney has a lot of Marvel phone games in Unity
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.
it’s just edgy teens saying that they’re gonna go murder them, it’s not really going to happen but they have to take safety precautions
You have to take those seriously unfortunately.
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.
still stupid and those people should end up in jail for some time.
Yeah, these people would need to be real for the jail haha
People making up false crime deff should go to jail
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.
You got a lot of faith in bad actor’s claims…
Shitty Executive: “Oh shit, our terrible idea turned out to be wildly unpopular and we’re getting massive negative feedback! Quick, play the death threats card to make us look like the victim!”
Perhaps they could pay a small fee to not receive them.
Or purchase the Happy Customer Times Season Pass, where for 12 months they only receive feedback telling them how awesome they’re doing. Only $39.99 per employee!
*fees are liable to change at any time without notice, new prices may be applied retroactively
I’m sure there’s a PR playbook somewhere with a flowchart that says, did you screw up really badly and you look like the villain? - yes - There’s public outrage? - yes - say there’s death threats
No need for death threats. Unity already committed suicide.
Ouch.
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.
I hope so, but frankly we’ll just have to see. The people with the money and power usually win.
What a grade A burn.
Unsurprisingly, it’s likely that this “death threats” situation was made up by the ceo: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16j21jg/the_truth_behind_the_unity_death_threats/
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:
all2 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.
https://www.polygon.com/23873727/unity-credible-death-threat-offices-closed-pricing-change
Polygon also contacted Police in the other cities and also the FBI, this was the only reported death threat against Unity that anyone knew of.
This is increasingly looking like the CEO is throwing a pity party and he’s trying to trick us all into coming.
Everyone blaming “people” in the comments and they just fell to the CEO charade to get sympathy points.
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.
That just redirects to thread
16j21jg. They’re generating opaque unique IDs so they can track permalinks now?Damn, that’s scummy as fuck. I’ll try to get the proper permalink.
Whatcha wanna bet there aren’t any death threats? Seems to be a go to for “we’re assholes, but look at these imaginary assholes instead!”
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.
I don’t say that in Support of unity though.
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.
You’ve seen people follow through on death threats?
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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.
I don’t doubt for a second they are real. There are some really scary sycophantic gamers out there.
This guy fucks
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.
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.
Wild. Murica lol.
The one guy working on a PS2 emulator also quit because death threats.
Why not make sustainable laws to prevent shitty companies from doing things like this instead of “social justice”
Because the most successful senior citizen daycare facility is the US Senate. A lot of these people still think of computers as being Commodore 64s.
Companies are allowed to make bad decisions bro.
The overreaction to online death threats is so stupid. An anonymous 0 follower Twitter account allows organizations and people to instantly turn the PR situation around and become the victims and act like they are personally being hunted down by Mossad.
Death threats are the background noise of the internet, always have been. It’s just part of the PR manual now.
I remember someone telling me they were going to hunt me down and kill me on StarCraft back in like 2001. Shit hasn’t changed
To be fair, you zerg rushed me in the first five minutes despite our prior agreement.
gl hf nr20
To be faaiirrrrrrr
To be fair, you are a ghost haunting a computer and have been since the year 2001
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.
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.
Rich choking and killing the planet knowingly with no regard for human or any other life = unity devs
500 IQ
Pretty amazing how a small group on Lemmy can make Reddit look almost sane.
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.
Please teach us how the world works.
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.
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Because developers totally saw something like this coming. 🙄
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No one’s. You’re just victim blaming.
Those after school specials were all bullshit.
Nice try Mr. Marijuana Pusher. Thanks to Nancy Reagan I’ll “just say no”
That 4chan sure is a wild dude.
I am usually against such and still am, you should never send anyone deaf that’s, that is a felonious offense.
That said I don’t feel sorry for the victim. You can’t blackmail every game developer in the world simultaneously and expect nothing to happen.
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I’m torn, they’re people I don’t want workers harmed but I think more harm needs to come to C suites that just get greedy
When you call for violent threats you give ammo to the very groups that you wish to inflict harm upon for the masses to side with them
Accountability for CEO actions needs to be done financially. It needs to first and foremost affect shareholders - because that’s the only point for a public company to exist - and then after that it needs to personally penalize CEOs.
If you just target the figurehead of a company the owners won’t really be affected. You need to get them where it REALLY hurts - in the wallet. Only then will the dynamic change.
We can see clearly that that’s not happening. No one has any actual sympathy for Unity and even the most highly upvoted comments in this thread are of people justifying it.
No one in the masses sides with them. People are not that stupid.
I have a fuckload of sympathy for this company after people call in death threats.
You people are acting insane. The proper response here is for devs to stop using unity not to fucking threaten to kill people dude.
You only have a fuckload of sympathy for them because you either have a political agenda or they’re lining your pocketbook. Either way, your opinion is irrelevant.
You’re acting insane. And vile, and despicable. The proper response to people saying #EatTheRich is to leave them the hell alone. If people agree with the dumb death threats and stupidity, that’s their right. Not everyone has to think like you to be good or valid people. You’re deeply problematic for thinking otherwise.
You’re right. I’m being paid by unity and not just appalled at the insane gamer moment going on here
That’s the only explanation.
And no I won’t leave alone someone who is a piece of shit.
I’d say being dead really hurts them. Seriously though I get what you’re saying but it isn’t the reality and we know it. The rich take advantage of us, write the laws and just win overall.
I don’t see it as wrong for us to be violent toward these people
This, like cancel culture, is a direct result of a justice system that pretty much never delivers justice to the victims of the rich and the powerful. Fixing that is the only thing that can stop this escalating cultural phenomenon.
Prosecute the shit out of the people making death threats because I don’t want to live in a society that’s cool with that either.
They already do that in most jurisdictions. Solve the root problem, and the surface problem will be fixed. Only fix the surface, and…well, it’s like weeding dandelions.
One of the issue here, and I am in absolutely no way defending Unity, is that legally an executive team works for the shareholders. They must ensure shareholder return no matter what as they are in the hook for it.
Unity’s biggest issue is that they like many successful companies stopped innovating and have moved from a company run by technical people to one run by sales and marketing. Sales and marketing only know how to extract more out of the product they already have and not how to improve the product to make more in honest ways. I would (have) gladly given Unity more money if they offered tools that truly helped me get to market faster as then my win would be their win. Instead their product has become stagnant, slower not faster since 2019 and more expensive. I am getting less for more and it is unacceptable. Unity is a horrible business partner. But I can see why as they are a sales and marketing company now. Steve Jobs says it best in this 2 minute video. He got it. Why are so many other not getting this?
is that legally an executive team works for the shareholders. They must ensure shareholder return no matter what as they are in the hook for it.
Not an excuse for just blatantly fucking over the customers. By implementing this hostile pricing model, company is alienating their customers. Big game studios may or may not cough up the money (or just delay that payments and take Unity to court if threatened). Small companies will just not pay up and either kill their projects or redesign from the ground up using a diff engine. Indie devs will likely just use another engine all together.
It’s a clear money grab that will backfire on them (losing trust of an already small community, and thus money will slowly stop rolling in). Fucked by the loss of sales. Fucking over the shareholders and creating new bag holders. Only winners here are the insiders that dumped their shares before announcement.
C-level execs at Unity smoking crack.
I agree. I think the issue is though that Unity (like many successful companies) have become their own worse enemies. Steve Jobs in this 2 mins video really explains it well. It will resonate what is going on at Unity and why they pulled such a stupid move. Wrong people are in charge and they have no means to make money honestly. Intellectually and creatively bankrupt. https://youtu.be/tGKsbt5wii0?si=v8_A2jW5uLewhbVS
That doesn’t mean making decisions that can ultimately hurt the business or their partners though. You can be greedy while not alienating the developers who drive the company’s profits. Decisions like these could make them lose millions or even go out of business.
You could swap unity with any company really and it would be the same. once a business goes for an IPO, whatever mission/vision it had turns into making shareholders happy and fast. Profits go directly to shareholders by stock buybacks instead of R&D/salaries, so they have to squeeze consumers more and more with the same products to keep it up. it’s tragically comic that you mention Steve Jobs kinda talking about it when Apple turned into the GOAT of this stuff.
This is a reminder that paying for a subscription means t&cs can be changed. You aren’t buying the engine etc just a license to access/use it for a period of time. Stop buying subscriptions!
Somehow I get the feeling that this may not just be some unhinged internet troll throwing out online drivel from his mom’s basement. Unity’s pricing changes are posing an existential threat to smaller studios that meet the minimum income threshold and are placing the livelihoods of countless thousands of smaller game studio workers at stake. This is one of those changes that is going to impact whether you can continue to put food on the table.
John Riccitello has pissed off a lot of people with his disgusting levels of corporate greed, to the point where even the fourth circle of Hell may not be enough to punish his avarice once he pops his clogs. This move may even be worse than the crap Martin Shkreli pulled as a big pharma executive.
It’s bad, but it’s not “denying medical treatment to millions of sick people because they can’t pay” bad.
You are correct but in the opposite way, it seems it was a single employee at their company instead which the boss took and decided to say we’re getting death threats we’re going to close for the day, basically so he could go home early and people would feel bad for him and maybe not give him the flak that he deserves for such an awful decision that’s going to ruin the lives of smaller legitimate game developers who use unity.
Bruh it’s video games.
Bruh it’s people’s livelihoods.
Video game development is some of the worst paid tech sector jobs. Most developers will be able to move on to other work with relatively little interruption. It’s not ideal by any stretch but it’s not nearly on the same level as price gouging life saving pharmaceuticals
I don’t think devs that work for corporations really care about this change, if their group used Unity for some reason, they will just move on to their next job (and they’re the ones who are worst paid). Every indie dev or otherwise small dev company that has used Unity ever in it’s last ten years are now open to serious bad actors. A single person running a script can cost a dev hundreds of thousands of dollars on their own, whether a troll, just same guy pissed off for some reason or another, or even a competing dev. Hell, the one idiot living in his mother’s basement who sent death threats to Unity could also do it.
There is no “relatively little interruption”, as not only have people lost a lot of work on something they already paid for, they also have to remove all previous work they’ve made or published with the engine. It’s all susceptible to attack.
I agree it’s not on the same level as pharma scum, but saying “it’s just a video games” is much too far off the other end of the spectrum. At least Shkreli never managed to bankrupt people who had purchased anything (from him) in the past, or made them ‘regurgitate’ any benefits they had seen. Though I’m sure he’d have loved to.
People here are having a fuckin real one man.
