1y ago

Unity reportedly told dev Planned Parenthood and children's hospital are "not valid charities"

www.gamesindustry.biz Unity reportedly told dev Planned Parenthood and children's hospital are "not valid charities"

Developers of indie puzzle game Orgynizer have claimed that Unity said organisations like Planned Parenthood are "not v…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5555641

archive.org
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."

114 comments

“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.
  
  Planned Parenthood Federation of America
  EIN 13-1644147
- Coincidentally if Unity stays course and gets sued this will be what the courts say, too.

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.
- I feel sorry for the employees, but ultimately the company chose the CEO it's not like he turned up and forced himself on them or anything. They were really pleased when they announced him as well, as if he was going to be some kind of asset.
  It's the investors fault for having no business savvy. Sod em.
  
  Oh, the investors have business savvy. They’re the ones driving these changes, and making a killing on the stock market as a result.
  When they’re done, Unity will be a pile of rubble and they’ll move on to their next victim.
- https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/planned-parenthood/C00314617/summary/2020
  It's absolutely not a charity.
  
  That's an associated PAC, not Planned Parenthood proper that's a 501(c)(3).

Devs may as well bite the bullet & switch engines mid development now, because I'm not buying any new games made in Unity.
- Yup. I'm not either.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  There are a lot of fun indie titles out there. Give it a chance.
- 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

Well as if it wasn't already obvious they were headed by conservatives...

They really want to kill themselves.
- Mood

Starting to think unity doesn't have a pr team

It's like he heard that there was no such thing as bad publicity and took that is literally as he possibly could
- He worked for EA. He has no idea how the industry works.
  
  Didn't EA during a partnership with Nintendo, suggest to them crippling Mario's Jump Height in order to sell "High Jump Boots" as DLC?

Calling PP a political org is too obtuse a message to view this response as a simple mistake or miscommunication. Unity is apparently run by conservative hacks and I hope they collapse.
- This isn't generic conservatism. Many Americans, who are conservative, support abortion rights. Unity seems to be in bed with far right political Christianity.
  
  *Christianity." Not too be confused with other types of Christianity. There's a lot of them, and while I am not any of them, it is important to be accurate.
- Christian nationalists will never be content unless they have complete domination

Unity is working on hanging itself
- Bankruptcy any%

The unity CEO is an arsonist as he's set ablaze the whole company. Guy should be investigated for fraud and malfeasance.
- he is challenging Elon Musk to a fuck (up) off. who can burn a company to the ground faster.
  I think the Unity CEO is winning, but hard to tell, because next to Twitter, Musk is also fucking with Tesla and SpaceX
  
  musk is going for the hat-trick
  
  Sorry, but Elon is about 40 billion in the red compared to this guy so I think he's got Unity bosses beat by a lot.
- And yet when he is inevitably asked to resign, after years of this shit-show, he’ll get yet another golden parachute. Stupidity fails upwards in the United States. And half of this country applaud it.

I can understand Planned Parenthood maybe, heavily disagree, but whatever.
But a children's hospital? How could that ever be classed as a "political group"?
What a joke.
- Thinking children's lives are worth anything outside of the womb, obviously
- Depends what Childrens Hospital it is. Shriners? Sure, that's a charity. Mayo Clinic - Children's Wing? Definitely not a charity.

By responding with judgment (e.g. your charitable donations are invalid ) Unity is showing how other devs can expect to be treated when they try to negotiate with Unity on a case-by-case basis.
This shows Unity is looking for bad faith reasons by which to justify rejecting exceptions to the fees. It's a bad idea to expect exception to the new fees, even in the face of bankruptcy.

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??

🤦‍♀️
- 🤦🤦

But they don’t want to cure cancer - they want to turn people into dinosaurs!
- I get this.
  
  I don't
- Why does this sound like the plot of the amazing Spider-Man movie

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.
  
  This is victim blaming. These devs already made those games and released them before Unity made these decisions.
  
  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.

As if I needed another reason not to use Unity.

planned parenthood is political yadda yadda yadda, but a children's hospital?
- It's a registered 501c3. Whatever anybody's opinions, it's a legal charity.
  
  Is it? https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/planned-parenthood/C00314617/summary/2020
- Planned parenthood shouldn't be political. In a few years drinking water well be seen as a policial statement against brawndo
- Seriously. I could see some right-wing shithead complaining about "evil" abortions, but who doesn't wanna save the lives of post-pregnancy children? Oh, that's right. Right-wing shitheads. As always.
  
  And planned parenthood does WAY more than abortions. They save lives on the daily.
- There are no child hospitals in the Bible 😡😡😡/s
  
  There is no commandment "Thou shalt save children", duh.
- It's not some struggling hospital in a poor country, but an award-winning, Xbox-equipped premium institution in Michigan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.S._Mott_Children%27s_Hospital
  They obviously do good work and probably could use more money and, sure, I want sick children to have an Xbox, but I'd still feel misled by calling that 'charity'.

Aight, hope they're ready to lay in their grave now. It's over.

I can’t speak for the EU, but in the US charities are federally recognized and there are tax deductions available for donating to them. This being said, it depends on what specific “Planned Parenthood” you donate to.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) works to support health care providers at Planned Parenthood health centers across the country, educate the public on issues of reproductive and sexual health, and advocate for policy to expand access to health care. PPFA is a 501(c)(3) organization, and donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable under the law.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF) is the advocacy and political arm of Planned Parenthood, fighting to advance and expand access to sexual health care and defend reproductive rights. PPAF is a 501(c)(4) organization, and donations are not tax-deductible as a charitable contribution or business expense.

The anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric is the political part, not that they'd ever admit it. The children's hospitals though? That's new to me, and downright malevolent. Like Texas/Florida levels of evil right there.

So they're not going to support invalids then?
- Invalids?
  
  Disabled people I guess?

I mean one of them isn't.
- Yeah screw Michigan and it's awful children.

I mean Planned Parenthood is explicitly NOT a charity. It's an ineffective Political Action Committee that spent decades bilking donations and wasn't even able to codify roe v wade. They don't deserve shit. Hospitals in the US are also explicitly not Charities. They may be non-profits, maybe, but they don't run on donations, they expect payments from patients for services rendered. There is no world where those examples of the failures of a Capitalist society should be considered a charity.
- There's a PAC of the name but Planned Parenthood proper is a 501(c)(3).
- Except they're literally a charity.
- Yeah, and Michael Jordan isn't a former basketball player, he's an actor! And don't try to tell me that's a different person, because nothing can ever be named the same as another thing!
  
  So if Unity said Michael Jordan is not a valid basket ball player, would you be up in arms about it?

114 comments