cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5555641
Developers of indie puzzle game Orgynizer have claimed that Unity said organisations like Planned Parenthood are “not valid charities” and are instead “political groups.”
In a blog post, the EU-based developer LizardFactory said the plans to charge developers up to $0.20 per install if they reach certain thresholds would cost them “around 30% of the funds we have gathered and already sent to charity.”
As Unity clarified the runtime fee will not apply to charity games, LizardFactory reached out to the company to clarify their game would be exempt from the plan.
However, Unity reportedly said their partners were not “valid charities” and were viewed as “political groups.”
Profits made from the game go directly to non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, Michigan.
“We did this to raise money for a good cause, not to line the coffers of greedy scumbags,” the developers wrote in a blog post. “We have been solid Unity fanboys for over ten years, but the trust is scattered all over the floor.”
The developers are considering a move to open-source game engine Godot, “but we will have to recode our entire game because we refuse to give you a dime,” they wrote. “This is a mafia-style shakedown, nothing more, nothing less.”
Today, Unity responded to the ongoing backlash and apologised, acknowledging the “confusion and angst” surrounding the runtime fee policy.
The company has promised that changes to the policy will be shared in “a couple of days.”
“Charity” should be a question answered by “do they have a registered charity number?”
What’s considered a charity will differ country by country.
Only valid answer. If there’s a valid document stating charity status, no other discussion is needed.
That would require them to care enough to figure out how to verify if something is a registered charity and what they are called in each country. Some countries don’t even have the concept of registered charity in any form.
Planned Parenthood is a US institution, and a registered 501c3 non-profit charity, as defined by the IRS.
Though I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to dip their toes into the absolute shitstorm that is modern partisan politics in the US.
Sure, and you do that by looking up the tax status. As long as it’s considered a non-profit by the government, that’s it. That’s as non-political as you can get.
That’s as non-political as you can get.
Well you simply couldn’t be more wrong about that. The NFL was a charity not too long ago. I’m sure there are Christian conversion therapy “charities”, too. “Charity” is nothing more than a tax status. You can make a charity for anything, so long as you keep your finances appropriately.
It’s still not political since there’s no active choice to accept some and reject others, it’s purely based on tax status. That’s it, no politics, just facts.
The political quandary does not come from the tax status, it comes from the service they provide. If you think abortion is not a political topic then you need to dig your head out of the sand.
I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying that if their policy is to not look at the services they provide and only their tax status, they can stay away from the whole political angle. But as soon as they block just one tax-exempt org, then it becomes political.
Correct, which is what has happened here. The user above I think is misunderstanding the situation, or is perpetuating right-wing drivel. Due to the state of political discourse in the States, I’m going to take a guess it’s the latter, because I’ve learned not to give the benefit of the doubt.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
EIN 13-1644147
Coincidentally if Unity stays course and gets sued this will be what the courts say, too.
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Right wing groups in the US made Planned Parenthood a political issue. It doesn’t make it a political organization.
I feel sorry for Unity because I want them to be profitable and all that. However, they have a greedy prick for a CEO and one of the dumbest change rollouts I’ve seen (Twitter has been crazy bad lately too) at this scale. It wipes away any empathy for them and makes you yearn for their collapse.
It’s absolutely not a charity.
That’s an associated PAC, not Planned Parenthood proper that’s a 501©(3).
Devs may as well bite the bullet & switch engines mid development now, because I’m not buying any new games made in Unity.
This (Unity change not your statement) will be a shank at the back of most indie devs.
Right–the AAA studios will just consider if they should use Unreal or an in-house engine. They’ll put it all in a big spreadsheet and come to a conclusion.
Indie devs that are on Unity are going to get hurt by this scheme. They’ll also get hurt if you don’t buy their games because they’re in Unity. The choices here aren’t great.
The one thing is Unreal seems to have been preferred for a while now, anyway. Unity was already losing market share, and is now only going to accelerate that.
If you’re doing 2D, some devs have been actively documenting the migration from Unity to Godot to make things easier for others to follow suit.
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The list of games I can’t buy is too damn long. Like anything else in the modern age you’re forced to support unethical business practices or withdraw from the industry altogether (if you even can).
Can buy games from EA or Activision/Blizzard/Microsoft/Xbox or Ubisoft, or anything made with Unity, or anything with Denuvo, or anything with anti-cheat, or anything that’s online-only. Did I leave anything out?
Steam Deck + boring indie games is what we’re left with until gamers get together and collectively stop supporting the atrocity that is modern gaming.
I do not think this is a place for consumer action. It is good the devs are running their awareness campaign for gamers. If a dev releases a game made in Unity in 2025 it is because they have made the decision that it is the best course of action for their business. Maybe they have a B2P or subscription model that makes the runtime cost more sustainable over throwing out N years for development effort.
At the end of the day Unity is a business to business product. The developers are the customer, not the players. If Unity’s new pricing and business practices don’t make sense to developers then developers will no longer use it and Unity will fail without player intervention.
I don’t think your goal is to further hurt the devs. Boycotting games made with Unity is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’
People still buy Lenovo laptops, Sony music, use Microsoft products and Google services.
No matter how loathsome and evil a company has acted towards their oysters, there will always be people who lined up to get shucked.
It’s slightly different when you show consumers you’re willing to screw them out of nowhere than when you show businesses that you’ll do so. People shake that stuff off as an annoyance because they aren’t dependant on those businesses behaving decently in order for them to keep the lights on. When a partner shows it could randomly kill your business at any moment for no good reason, you tend to realise the importance of disengaging from them.
Taking a play from the budlight playbook.
Lol, k
This is their downfall hiring that CEO and the leadership should be ashamed. I feel sorry for the employees who had no say in this and are being affected by their myopic choices.
I wish someone would put up a huge donation to Godot and offer to hire a number of these engine devs. I’m sure there’s a ton of talented devs who would be willing to take a pay cut to work on a more open alternative.
A bunch of people contributing a little bit each month would also be huge:
https://www.patreon.com/godotengine
- I’m not associated with the dev team, but I use Godot for my projects and send back some money voluntarily
Please use the Godot Development Fund so more of your contribution goes to Godot.
Thank you for the update! I’ll switch over <3
Well as if it wasn’t already obvious they were headed by conservatives…
They really want to kill themselves.
Mood
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Children’s hospital are actually a more legally challenging claim that they’re not charities, at least in some cases (edit: I did not check if that specific hospital is legally a charity).
But PP is classified as a charity at the federal level. If you give cash to PP, you can claim the amount you gave as a gift to a charity. That’s all you need to know.
So when they say charity, they don’t actually mean charity. They mean some weird shit that they’re making up. Because there’s a legal definition of “charity” and PP is part of it.
Starting to think unity doesn’t have a pr team
I think this is their PR team.
💩
it’s a Profit Relations division
It’s like he heard that there was no such thing as bad publicity and took that is literally as he possibly could
Unity is working on hanging itself
Bankruptcy any%
Well I’m not going to buy any more Unity games, and I’m going to uninstall any Unity games I have. Fuck those guys.
Duolingo bird is going to be sad.
🤦♀️
🤦🤦
Lol could Unity have bungled this any harder??
Idk why anyone trusts peddlers of proprietary bullshit
For real dude it’s really hard to feel bad for 2d game devs when an open source solution has been around for years.
It’s like the whole xitter situation. Why would you want to stay on a platform that so obviously doesn’t want you there? bUt MaStOdOn Is HaRd 🙄 grow up, move on, stop investing in capitalists ideas that only benefit you when it benefits them.
The features of Twitter vs mastodon is close to 1:1, but Godot vs Unity is not even close.
The amount of time to learn to use Twitter or Mastodon is a few minutes. The amount of time to learn Godot or Unity is months getting going, and years to become an expert.
Twitter is something people use for entertainment and communication. Unity and Godot are literally people’s livelihood.
This comparison is just fucking awful. Your lack of empathy for people who have literally put months of man hours into projects based on existing tooling, business models, and licensing agreements, only to have a massive rug pulled out from under them is just pathetic. If you don’t feel bad, you’re a fucking asshole and that’s on you. Stop trying to justify it.
I know they are people’s livelihoods, but you’d think people would have chose a platform that supported that to begin with.
I have no empathy because Godot and other open source engines have been around for a while now but no one cared until the proprietary option became unviable.
Fine we’ll use Photoshop in our thought experiment. Say tomorrow adobe decides to charge a royalty per picture produced. Yes people have put millions of hours in learning Photoshop and producing pictures in Photoshop. The whole time gimp, Krita and various other open source photo editors existed and were developed with hardly any main stream support. I feel for the open source devs that never got any support until the masses’ proprietary developers decided they didn’t want to support them learning their platform anymore.
I don’t support unitys decisions but I look forward to Godot getting the support they have so long deserved. I also look forward to any game dev that uses godot and owns their game rather than rents the engine their game is built on.
I should say I know people that got burned by Adobe’s copic decision. Now hardly anyone I know uses it because they can’t afford to get burned by adobe again.
As if I needed another reason not to use Unity.
