833
Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
833 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
59135 readers
2532 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Really? Everyone who couldn't afford it had access through him? This is certainly a revelation, and not something made up from the internet.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/martin-shkreli-pharmaceuticals-ceo-interview
I'm surprised, it does seem that this is true. I read a lot of articles where he announced that people could apply for medication, or medicaid would pay $0.01 per pill. I couldn't find anything about where to apply or one people who have applied and been able to get this medication, but there is already a generic alternative, so this program might be dead in the water.
As for smear campaign, I'm not so sure. Everytime I read quotes from him, it seems he just really likes to play the "bad boy". Maybe he just wants people to think pharmaceutical companies are scumbags, so when he ran one he purposefully made himself look bad. Shkreli definitely didn't seem to care that people got a bad impression of him.
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.
Video game development is some of the worst paid tech sector jobs. Most developers will be able to move on to other work with relatively little interruption. It's not ideal by any stretch but it's not nearly on the same level as price gouging life saving pharmaceuticals
I don't think devs that work for corporations really care about this change, if their group used Unity for some reason, they will just move on to their next job (and they're the ones who are worst paid). Every indie dev or otherwise small dev company that has used Unity ever in it's last ten years are now open to serious bad actors. A single person running a script can cost a dev hundreds of thousands of dollars on their own, whether a troll, just same guy pissed off for some reason or another, or even a competing dev. Hell, the one idiot living in his mother's basement who sent death threats to Unity could also do it.
There is no "relatively little interruption", as not only have people lost a lot of work on something they already paid for, they also have to remove all previous work they've made or published with the engine. It's all susceptible to attack.
I agree it's not on the same level as pharma scum, but saying "it's just a video games" is much too far off the other end of the spectrum. At least Shkreli never managed to bankrupt people who had purchased anything (from him) in the past, or made them 'regurgitate' any benefits they had seen. Though I'm sure he'd have loved to.
People here are having a fuckin real one man.