8 ms·

Unity cancels town hall over reported death threats

• omoikane 3y ago
  See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510958 - Video-Game Company Unity Closes Offices Following Death Threat
• karaterobot 3y ago
  A surefire way to lose my sympathy—even in a situation in which one party is indie developers working on passion projecs, and the other party is almost cartoonishly villainous CEO John Riccitiello—is to issue a death threat. If you think a death threat is just a way to express how much you care about something, you're wrong. Death threats aren't punctuation marks, dummies.
  • breezeTrowel 3y ago
    The death threats probably came from Tim Cook since Unity decided to torpedo developers right before the Vision Pro launch and Unity is the engine Apple has been promoting for Vision Pro app development.
    • netsharc 3y ago
      "Oh and one more thing... introducing the iClusterBomb."
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        Sent from my iPhone
    • TillE 3y ago
      Yeah I was thinking about how annoyed Apple must be about Unity cratering their own reputation. Their terrible relationship with Epic precludes any Unreal Engine partnership as well. It's very interesting that Apple has been increasingly emphasizing high-end games, starting with the Apple Silicon Macs, and just recently with the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple buying Unity is not out of the question. They don't have a lot of other attractive options.
      • kridsdale3 3y ago
        If Apple has M&A aspirations about Unity, this reputation and stock price crash is a dream come true.
  • pc86 3y ago
    Who are you talking to?
    • TillE 3y ago
      Exactly. For any kind of large contentious issue, there will always be weirdos "on your side". Nobody can control the weirdos. It's deeply disingenuous to act like some anonymous fringe troll is representative of the larger group. We've been living in the global internet age for the past ~25 years, this shouldn't be a shock to anyone.
  • derefr 3y ago
    That sounds like you're someone who's very easily manipulated by psy-ops done by the companies themselves, then.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > someone who's very easily manipulated by psy-ops done by the companies themselves You’re alleging Unity fabricated these death threats?
      • davikr 3y ago
        Not necessarily, but they could have an interest in spotlighting death threats written by individuals not in the industry (gamers) to showcase how everyone rallying against one of their actions is bad: which is precisely what happened to the OP of this chain.
        • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
          > they could have an interest in bringing death threats written by individuals not in the game development industry Sure? It’s still a death threat. Sending employees home has a real cost. The existence of death threats, moreover, is unlikely to change developers’ hearts and minds. The nuttier ones will write it off as a conspiracy theory. Most will see it as irrelevant to their interests. People who make death threats don’t need to underwrite their insanity. Their incoherence doesn’t make them less dangerous.
          • davikr 3y ago
            I don't think there is any conspiracy or "psyop" involved in writing fake threats or sending people home for PR points in this case, but I'd be pressed to change my opinion over nutjobs (in this case, probably gamers) being violent.
      • kadoban 3y ago
        I would suggest that every company over a certain size gets a certain number of death threats. If, hypothetically, a company just managed to piss off, I don't know...everyone, one strategy to garner some cheap sympathy and have an excuse to cancel public gatherings might be to highlight some of those they were getting all the time anyway.
  • kitanata 3y ago
    [dead]
  • xwdv 3y ago
    If you can’t sympathize with the people making death threats, you are not sufficiently invested in the problem, and should probably not be passing judgement.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > If you can’t sympathize with the people making death threats, you are not sufficiently invested in the problem I can sympathise with someone while acknowledging they should go to jail, and also sympathising with the people they’re attacking for taking prudent safety measures.
  • joemi 3y ago
    My guess is that it's just some immature gamer, not an actual developer. All gamers aren't immature, but there's always some immature base group of them doing absolutely stupid stuff.
  • bgirard 3y ago
    The people making the death threats don't present the party of indie developers as a whole.
  • maybelsyrup 3y ago
    Unity’s the one making death threats: the proposed changes threaten the livelihoods of the customer base — the food in people’s mouths and the roofs over their heads. They have all the interest in the world in playing this aspect down and playing up the inevitable reaction to backing human beings into an existential corner: fight, flee, or freeze. In shock, someone says “you come after me, I can come after you, too.” Blaming them is beside the point: you don’t want death threats made to you? Don’t make them to others. It’s pretty simple. If this is “a surefire way to lose my sympathy,” you never had any sympathy in the first place.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • coldtea 3y ago
    Worked well for most of human history for political change!
  • Scion9066 3y ago
    https://www.polygon.com/23873727/unity-credible-death-threat-offices-closed-pricing-change https://www.polygon.com/23873727/unity-credible-death-threat... > 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.
• prepend 3y ago
  This seems strange as a major corporation should be able to provide security to protect against death threats. And it should be the exact same security it provides normally for any large employee gathering. Assuming that death threats actually took place and they were actually credible. Seems silly for a company to not be able to act because of death threats. That seems like a viable reason for an individual or a very small dev, but it seems like there’s a now a way to just stop Unity from doing stuff. Cynically, I assume they just don’t want the negative PR and wanted a reason to cancel.
  • majormajor 3y ago
    > This seems strange as a major corporation should be able to provide security to protect against death threats. And it should be the exact same security it provides normally for any large employee gathering. "A large employee gathering" for a lot of companies happens every day in the office. How much security presence does the average office have, in your experience? In mine, the answer is not that much. I've never seen enough that I'd think the same level would be enough for death threats outside of things like defense contractors or military. Everywhere else it would be pretty easy to walk in, shoot the front desk people, take their badge, go anywhere in the building.
    • prepend 3y ago
      My current employer has armed security guards. It’s pretty big with over 10,000 people with each physical location having 1,000+. Guards check badges and vehicles. Before that I worked for a fortune 100 company and our regional office was in a shared office building that had receptionists and 1-2 armed guards who kind of roamed. They weren’t always visible but they were usually in the lobby. And I worked for startups they had no one at all and just a door with a key and then keycard scanner. I’ve visited google and Microsoft’s campuses and they have pretty strict security. So I think it’s a size and budget thing. It would be extremely difficult to walk into my employer, shoot the front desk people and take their badge.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    There's a reason people use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution": it means they don't really think the risk is significant enough to do anything, but they know they'll be blamed if something goes wrong after they didn't cancel.
• umvi 3y ago
  > We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. It would be one thing if Unity were hosting the game on their infra, but I still have to pay Unity a fee if I host the download on my own website?
  • sosodev 3y ago
    Yes, they claim that the fee is for their support of whichever platform the user installed on.
  • derefr 3y ago
    Quoting https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/728361889628913664/sure-eventually-but-the-current-verbiage https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/728361889628913664/sure-ev...: > For my money, the most interesting part of the whole Unity debacle is that by a strict reading of the new policies, ceasing to offer one's Unity-based games for sale won't even work as a means of getting around the fees: if your Unity-based game is no longer available for sale after January 1st, you'd still be on the hook for the Unity Runtime installation fee for new installs performed by previous legitimate purchasers, even in cases where such installs are performed from physical or archival media or are otherwise impossible for you to prevent.
    • kimbernator 3y ago
      Certainly that can't be enforceable. There's no agreement to the terms, in fact a tacit disagreement and loss of profit by the developer/storefront. This all feels like Unity is pushing an obviously terrible concept so they can back down to a slightly-less-terrible one and look slightly more reasonable. I'd bet they will switch to a larger per-sale fee after a little longer of people making noise.
    • empyrrhicist 3y ago
      Yeah there's no way that's enforceable.
    • bgirard 3y ago
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  I suppose generating death threats is one way to demonstrate product-market fit and a steep moat.
• neilv 3y ago
  I'm sure that there are a lot of Internet-empowered and recent-political-era-inspired mentally ill people who will make death threats casually. It's sad and shameful. But did Unity not want to do the town hall over videoconferencing (if offices shut), or was there some other reason that they didn't want to do the town hall?
  • yAak 3y ago
    Maybe just cancelled due to the short-notice. But, I also wouldn't be surprised if leadership doesn't have great answers to the questions their employees would have asked if the meeting had happened.
  • HideousKojima 3y ago
    Anyone (or any company/organization) can find enough crazies out there willing to send death threats (or to just be saying mean things they pretend are actual threats, stuff like "I hope you die in a fire") to avoid any uncomfortable interactions with the piblic or their userbase. That said, this was a thing well before the internet. I used to work at a TV and radio station, and the head of security had his office right next to us in IT. Any letters sent to our on air talent were filtered through him first, and a huge amount had stamps on the outside of the envelope saying "This letter was sent from a correctional facility" along with the name of the institution. Lots of letters ranging from creepy to outright threatening. I didn't regularly get to see them so I couldn't give you any hard numbers, but one thing I noticed that made me skeptical of claims that women get harassed/threatened more than men is that our weatherman by himself got about as many creepy letters as most of our female talent combined.
    • happytoexplain 3y ago
      The perception that women are harassed/threatened more is probably differentiated from your experience by a couple factors: 1. It includes people who are not broadcast figures, which is the vast majority of people. It's possible that, in public, in the workplace, and in school, a woman is more likely to be harassed than a man. 2. The nature of harassment/threats against women is probably biased towards the more emotion-provoking (sinister, intimidating, sexual, etc). I.e. the kinds of things that tend to engender more concern, in the sense of how bad it feels to imagine/witness, how likely it is to come to something more, the likelihood of a power imbalance (physical or otherwise), and its long-term effects on the recipient.
• xyst 3y ago
  Yet another reason why development should only take place on FOSS game engines. If a company has hostile/incompetent C-level management, community forks it and maintain it as free use.
  • pjlegato 3y ago
    The features offered by commercial engines are lightyears ahead of FOSS engines, especially at the high end. If you're running a commercial game studio in such a brutally competitive market as video games, how can you afford to use FOSS? Your choices are go without high-end features that your competitors do have; or divert resources from your game content to build them in-house. Both seem less attractive than "just buy a commercial engine" to many studios.
    • HideousKojima 3y ago
      Or focus more on good gameplay and less on technical features. Not every game needs to be a AAA open world extravaganza and graphics powerhouse.
    • eestrada 3y ago
      Lots of studios still build engines from scratch for this very reason: get exactly what they want and avoid vendor lockin. A good FOSS engine that gets them 50% of the way there for free? Seems like a pretty good deal to me. So long as the engine can be extended to get the features they want, it makes sense to use a FOSS one instead of building from scratch. Also, inhouse tooling will need to be built regardless, whether the engine is commercial, in house from scratch, or FOSS. If the studios give back to the FOSS engine source code, it creates a virtuous cycle, like with the Linux kernel. Everyone wins.
• stuckinhell 3y ago
  This whole thing has made me re-evaluate what software I use. FOSS all the way from here.
• mattlondon 3y ago
  Obligatory: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
• dcow 3y ago
  Okay I was talking about this with a few friends because it’s now a “debacle” and actually did the math. Unity is cheaper than Unreal across the board whether you release a $70 AAA or a $5 indie experiment. And that’s with worst case numbers. It’s even cheaper if you’re a pro or enterprise user. On my napkin: for a $30 indie title at the 200k install threshold it washes out to be a 0.67% “revenue share”. Unreal charges 5%. So can someone show me the math where indie devs are getting screwed? How is this possibly so bad that people are sending “credible death threats” to the CEO? Or is the issue just the attempt to apply the terms retroactively? That I understand. If Unity said “going forward this is pricing, we aren’t going to retroactively apply the runtime fee to installs prior to Jan 1, 2024”, would the fuss die down?
  • clipsy 3y ago
    The problem is that installs are not sales.
    • iMerNibor 3y ago
      To give an example: user installs the game on their pc? unity wants the fee paid for that same user installs it on their laptop? pay again same user upgrades their pc and has to install the game again? unity wants their install fee I believe they also initially said that deinstall + install would incur another charge, but backpeddalled there (weird)
  • goosinmouse 3y ago
    Yeah i definitely see both sides of this issue. In the end i'd bet 95% or more of the revenue changes from this big model is going to come from large game studios anyway. What i think people aren't getting is Unity probably implemented the per install fee in anticipation of the Apple vision pro. An extremely large amount of vision pro apps are going to be using Unity because of the new partnership with apple.
  • mattlondon 3y ago
    I don't think just saying "hey it is still cheaper than unreal so what is the problem?" There are now new fees that people didn't have to pay previously. I.e. devs used to use unity and now they still use unity but have to pay more than they did before. Unreal might not even factor in for them. Indie devs potentially make negative profits at the best of times. That doesn't make death threats (even "credible" ones...) ok though. Just use Godot and move on.