1y ago

Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes

www.engadget.com Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes

Unity has temporarily closed its offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas and canceled a town hall meeting after receiving death threats. The company made the call as a precaution against possible retribution after it announced a contentious change to its business model this week.

249 comments

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
  
  20 cents for every death threat not sent? Sure! Whos counting? Dont worry, our propiertary system counts every unsent message, you only need to pay up ^(works every previously unsent message, but only if you got more than 200 000 the past year, we got you)
  Bit seriously, why do some people always so eager to send death threats? It almost never achieves anything, gets you on the moral low ground and doesn't even get to the right persons the first place.
- 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

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:~~all~~ 2 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.
- https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/mLv9uIQ1vO
  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.

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.

This shouldn't be a distraction from the core issue, but obviously people should cut this shit out.
You can't sneeze online without some sociopathic child threatening to slit your throat.
Edit: Annnd it was an employee of Unity that made the threats...
- THAT IS NOT TRUE AT ALL!
  I SHOULD SLIT YOUR THROAT FOR SAYING SUCH OBVIOUS WRONG STATEMENTS!
  /s
  
  One day you're going to sneeze, and then you'll get yours.
- I take it you don't use the engine

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?
- I was thinking this. A way to demonize the counter movement
  
  Hmm seems like we called it:
  https://lemmy.ca/post/5340114
- I will absolutely take that bet. Given both how unpopular the decision is combined with it being even tangentially related to the gaming community I would be astonished if they didn't receive death threats.
- 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.
- Well, they are idiotic, yes. In the sense that if you mean to kill someone, telling them beforehand is wildly counter-productive.
- 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

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
  
  join a community with your values, lemmy is federated, if you don't like your community join another :)
  
  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.
  
  Pretty amazing how a small group on Lemmy can make Reddit look almost sane.

That 4chan sure is a wild dude.
- Who is this four chin hacker you speak of?
  
  The elite hacker known as 4chan

I hate humanity sometimes, why would they send death threats? Just don't use their engine; this is the way you actually make a change -- switch to something else, threatening people does not help you prove your point. I hate their new pricing changes too, but death threats are never warranted
- Im some cases I could see how this could destroy someone's livelihood and people have killed over that sort of thing before. But my guess is that the people sending the death threats probably aren't even developers.
- Looks like it’s bullshit. https://feddit.it/comment/2515772
- While I'm not defending those who sent these death threats or justifying these actions, I'm sure a lot work and progress will be lost for many companies because of these outrageous changes. It should be no surprise that many if not all of their clients are gonna be angry. Switching to another engine isn't like switching from reddit to the fediverse.
  
  They're changing pennies per install, and only after the publisher is receiving over $200,000 per year, and they don't count the first 100,000 installs. The price goes down dramatically for customers at the higher subscription tiers. I don't understand why people are so pissed about them wanting such a tiny cut for providing the software that does so much heavy lifting for game developers.
- What's more curious to me is what kind of people are those that resort to such lows?
  I mean they might have mental issues,yes,but it's scary to see that people seemingly intelligent and able to create games (asset flipping not included) can have such low morals and problem solving capabilities.
- I absolutely agree. I'd want to say those threats are people outside of the industry. People in the industry have received death threats themselves so they understand that it's real shitty, right? I hope so.

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.

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.

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?
https://youtu.be/tGKsbt5wii0?si=km7LTxsY6gwD-mvo
- 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 partially what "eat the rich" rhetoric meant when acted on.
- There is seriously a mental health pandemic going on and it's scary. Everyone here who has messages or upvotes messages about bringing out the guillotine or killing billionaires really needs to seek help.
  And there is a fucking lot of you here on lemmy.
  
  Well then, do what you tell people who condemn rapists and pedophiles to do: learn some empathy.
  People who hold different opinions and worldviews than you aren't fucking mentally ill. You are by insinuating such. You are not the center of the universe and your opinions are not automatically facts just because you hold them.
  Americans actually do still have a constitutional right to advocate overthrowing their government if they want; the whole fucking point of the first and second amendments is to enable the people to do just that.
  I'm tired of people like you and your vile bullshit. Don't like it, get out of the thread. But don't come in here with your holier-than-thou act thinking you're going to bully or guilt trip or emotionally blackmail anybody into sitting down or submitting to your opinion like you've been doing to the American people for decades now.
  
  Found the rich guy

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.
  
  Martin gave the medication for free/reduced prices to people who couldn't afford it. It was literally a smear campaign.
- 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.
  
  People here are having a fuckin real one man.

This is a reminder that there are crazy people on the internet.
But this is NOT a reason to have sympathy for Unity.

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!

Starting on January 1, developers will be charged a fee every time someone installs a game built in Unity after they reach certain revenue or install thresholds.
Obviously death threats are not ok, but for fucks sake, that change is insane. People may install games many times for many reasons, like switching drives, computer, OS or debugging, or corruption, or because they go back to it after not playing for a while.
How is it a good model to charge for repeated installs?
The decision sparked an astonishing backlash against Unity from across the gaming industry,
I bet, this will threaten some people on their livelihood, and if you are 90% finished on a project, it's an insane change that will force you to switch to another engine, and could kill several projects.
Also as a user, this increases the need and amount of DRM mechanics, which we need less not more of.
I hope Unity will see a massive dive in customers on these policies. This is the kind of decision a company deserves bankruptcy for. And the CEO John Riccitiello deserves to be fired without benefits, and never hired as CEO again.
Edit PS:
The fee is up to $0.20, that's steep and would mean the end of sub $10 games. This would hurt single and indie developers very much.
Luckily there are other engines, but Unity used to be among the good ones, now they've become an untrustworthy player, and that decreases competition for the entire field.
- This is why we cannot let monopolies control the internet. Between twitter, reddit, and unity...
  
  Unreal is much more entrenched than Unity is. At the AAA level, more places hire Unreal devs than Unity devs.
  Unity is popular with indies because it's dead simple (Unreal is a complex monster of an engine). But even Unreal doesn't have a monopoly, between things like Source, Lumberyard (which is now FOSS and run by the Linux Foundation), etc. Not to mention you can always roll your own engine, which many places already have.

All because Amongus sold so many times…

Well looking on the bright side. If death threats are starting to become common for the decisions that companies make then maybe WFH should also be common to protect employees. Can't target employees at an empty office. The employees will have to be careful with social media however.
- Personally I’m leaning more towards wanting to handle the death threats themselves.
  Because ya know they would continue and now you have to arm your home because corporate greed
  Hate this idea a lot
  
  because or corporate greed
  Corporate greed didn't force these lunatics to have a gamer moment. There are ways to express displeasure that aren't fucking death threats man.
- Well it seems like there we're no death threats and the CEO largely made this up basically as an excuse to close the office.
  For the record it was a single employee, there were no people sending them death threats.
  
  I like how you included a Lemmy link to a Reddit thread. We're gonna go full circle soon!

Mm, I'm curious as to what the threats actually were. I've seen people claim they got death threats because someone tweeted "kys" at them in response to their homophobic bullshit.

This is becoming standard operating procedure from companies that want a quick PR boost.

One threat, from and employee. Sigh.
More realistic outcome - some game loving tweenage hacker does something fantastically destructive in whatever part of their infrastructure they can get into.

Unity is the sort of company Steve Jobs called out in this 2 min video clip. https://youtu.be/tGKsbt5wii0?si=v8_A2jW5uLewhbVS
- I still don't get how a guy with such brilliant insight could be an absolute moron in other areas (such as his personal medical treatment)…
  
  I don't understand, could you expand on his medical treatment?

Come on people glitter bombs and ddos is so much funnier
- 'member blackfaxing?
- Glitterbombing, Harmless fun for the whole family!

Oh no, the poor rich corporate executives who were just trying to fuck over their usebase made up some death threats!
Time to lick some boots - many of the people in this thread.
- Im just happy a rich man is facing consequences for his actions, even if he made them up.

Rich people love "death treats" start to think they pay others to call them in to appear like victims haha

How to destroy your company 101

ITP: Internet dumb fucks do internet dumb shit and send to death threats.
Comments feign an argument for hypocrisy ala “eat the reach is just as bad”
Save yourself some brain cells and move on

Godot users don't give death threats, just saying.

Fucking g*mers.
- 1v1 me?!

Man, I wish people put this kind of effort into more important shit. Shitty wages, inhospitable environment incoming, and useless CEO fucks causing it all, BUT DAMN YOU UNITY!

Gamers: pointlessly sacrificing the moral high ground since 2014.
- Fuck a moral high ground

Is this because the gaming community has an unfortunate number of hateful trolls or what exactly?
- It's because of loose definitions of "death threats" and the fact that when you piss off millions of people a couple of them are bound to tweet "i hope u die" at a ceo
  
  If they had to close their offices, I think that's a good indication of it being serious.

Nice to see some repercussions for corporate greed

Death threats? Really now...
This is pathetic. Why send death threats because a company made a change to their product. Why are these people so entitled? Or maybe they just know there are no consequences to their actions so they behave in a shitty manner. If you don't like the changes then use a different product.
- First time on the internet? That’s all they do and swat people which results in real deaths. This isn’t anything new, same ol vile behavior that police do handle and do punish for because phone lines are not secure.

A sane response from the gamer community as usual.

Dude...Just stop using the software and let the business fail. That's all you've got to do. Unreal engine, Godot, Gamemaker Studio, Source 2, QBASIC, use something else.
- Not easy when your entire game is built on it. You'd most likely have to toss out your code and start from scratch.
  
  Depending on how much money you expect to lose, that may be the more prudent option for some.
  At the very least you'd have something to work with - it's not truly "from scratch".
  I work in the AAA industry and I've ported code from one engine to another - it's not fast by any means, but at the very least you can assume the code that's there is largely correct. The killers are materials/shaders, porting over design work, and fixing timing issues. If you have netcode that can be tricky as well.
  But at the very least you can have the core of your game running again reasonably. It's how things like Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe went from Source to Unity, and how Pokemon BDSP went from the proprietary Pokemon engine to Unity.
  Indies and AAs can hire some extra hands to work temporarily with their existing engineers to port and they'd probably lose less money than Unity is charging.
- Bro why don't homeless people just get homes? Problem solved.

Any time a gaming company does something stupid, leave it to gamers to out-stupid the company and prove that they deserved to get shit on in the first place

Relax it's just a game
- It's not a game it's a game engine, atleast get it right

Holy shit! I knew people got pissed, but this...🤣
Despite it's illegality. it's a type of protest. Better that being pissed off in twitter and the still cucking to unity in the end, but worse that just stopping using unity and porting existing games off the engine. Still, not everybody can still just do that, this is why something like this is understandable. Imagine being a indie dev team years in development with mounting costs and backers expecting a product and you expecting return for your work and then unity turns ups the leeching and fucking up your calculations and forcing you either to delay the launch, pay the financial cost of that delay, port to a different engine and learn a new skillset for that engine or bite the bullet and pay. Also Imagine the unity devs who will be out of a job because of this.

I'm not sure that I have a lot of sympathy for devs who entered into a contract with a for profit company, who are now changing the playing field.
Open source software or bust.
- Big corporations need service contracts. If something in the engine is broken where it impacts the game in development, engineers are flown in to fix it at the customer's site (if that’s necessary). That’s not something available with most open source tools.

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