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Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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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
Call me whatever you want but Im happy the people who make these bad decisions from their insulated lots in life have to face at least some kind of consequences now, because the law is explicitly set up so that they typically never have to. Sucks that it comes to this but its behavior analysis 101, if you dont introduce consequences for undesirable behaviors, you'd be an idiot to expect change.
I don't love that it's probably caught up a lot of people who have nothing or little to do with it though, but the guys at the top need consequences or nothing will change, and beggars cant be choosers.
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!
That's the idea. Here's hoping they get it.
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.
It comes from a poem. It's very literal
What poem if you don’t mind me asking?
Apparently this might have been created recently, even though the phrase goes back at least a few hundred years. Here's a transcription of the one I was talking about though:
“We are starving. There is no more bread, and we have nothing to eat.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t work for your bread,”
as if he did not snatch away the grain by his own greedy hands and create filling bread for his own overflowing mouth.
The poor cried,
“We are dying. There is no more medicine, and we’re all ill.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t take care of yourselves,”
as if he did not buy all the medicine and raise prices so high
the gods themselves would not
be able to reach.
The poor people
stopped crying,
and the rich man was satisfied…
Until they came knocking at his door one night;
their faces were sunken,
their flesh decaying,
their eyes sightless.
They were monsters
of the rich man’s
own making.
As they devoured his flesh,
the rich man cried,
“Please, spare me!”
The ravenous zombies said,
“Not our fault
you fattened yourself
for slaughter.”
Put the bite on the son of a bitch
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.
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
Depending how it’s implemented, gamers are absolutely impacted by it.
Some of the chatter is that even already-released games would be subject to this change, meaning a lot of devs might pull their backlog to avoid going broke on a game they put out years ago and is now free (or heavily reduced). Or games that have always been free, now the dev has to choose if they want to charge for a historically free game or pull it completely.
This is dev hostile, but it’s also consumer hostile.
I 100% agree on this, I've even made a post about it, where I mention for instance that this will cause a need for more DRM where we need less.
I'm not saying it isn't gamers, but unlike you, I find it unlikely. You may be right IDK.
I never said I found either option likely, I was only addressing the “this doesn’t impact gamers” bit.
I wrote DIRECTLY, of course they are impacted, but 99% don't know that, of the remaining 1% 99% don't care.
While for developers 100% both know and care.
Maybe you know, but what happens if a dev pulls a game and someone still has the installer and installs the game? Are they going to charge for that still? It makes not sense to me.
Unity clearly didn't think this part through- probably because they never intended it to do anything but rake in money as the company dies. They never had a real way of precisely tracking downloads, but they want all the info so they can decide how much to charge. So would they charge on a local installer? Almost certainly if they could find out it was used.
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?
The same way people who aren't directly affected by people being queer threaten to bomb places that host drag events.
Some people are just assholes.
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.
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.