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.
“But under the changes announced today, Unity Personal and Unity Pro users will pay fees if they hit $200,000 in revenue in a year and 200,000 lifetime installs. For anywhere from one to a million installs, those users will pay 20 cents per install. “It’s a price increase.”
If I have a mobile game selling for $1 on the apple store for instance and it uses Unity, and has has a million downloads/installs I then owe Unity $200,000 for an app that I didn’t even make $500,000 on because app stores like apple’s charge a 30% cut, sales exist, and it says installs which may mean a person buys the app once and installs it on more than one device. But that doesn’t in any way directly affect my livelihood as a developer or anything. Right?
But there are commercial entity, it’s their right to do so, with thebway thebcurrent laws and market is setup. “The free market will remove them from the equation if they’re not offering an attractive product at an attractive rate, in the face of competitors offering such”… in theory. In practice, I say fuck em. Stop using unity. Stop playing games made in unity. Let them die. A better offering will appear when they are off the table.
AFAIK, the retroactive nature of it doesn’t apply to already released games, but to games released with the new license terms. So if you released that mobile game last year, you wouldn’t need to pay $200k or whatever next year. However, if you release that same game next year, you would have to retroactively pay that $200k once the downloads exceeded the stated max.
So the solution is: don’t use Unity next year, especially if you’ll be selling a game for $1. It sucks since in-progress games would have to be reworked, and Unity should suffer for that, but it shouldn’t ever come to threats of violence.
That’s actually fair. But the point is that the popularity of a game could tank a developer with this business model. It could also affect past profits and purchases specifically because of the bit about downloads. It doesn’t differentiate between a user who’s downloaded a paid app on 6 different phones, 1 phone, 1000 phones. So if I for instance paid for I dunno Plants vs Zombies one time, the developer releases it with an update patch, I and then downloaded it onto every phone I have had since then or will have in the future that could be 10,.15, 20 downloads over my lifetime. What if I have a work phone? They’re not saying they can’t implement this even with old games. I don’t think they meant retroactively. I think they mean new installs of old games that have updates.
I guess I’d have to read through the contract, but generally these things only apply to games released after the new terms take effect, but updates to games released prior. So the dev would be fully aware of the policy at the point of releasing the game.
Unity seems to be catering to games with a recurring revenue model (ads, microtransactions, etc), and discouraging other revenue models, and I think most developers will recognize that with this pricing model.
So I don’t think Unity is trying to screw already released games, they’re just trying to limit their appeal to a certain type of game revenue model.
If software you use changes their pricing in a way that, in three month’s time, because you made only $500k last year and your game uses a freemium model such that you get a shitload of installs but don’t necessarily draw revenue from every install, so that that 20c per install adds up to the fact that you’ll be losing money come January, should you threaten the people at that software company with death? At that point, I think no.
If instead of that, they do something more akin to what Reddit did to the Apollo devs, and change the pricing such that they don’t have time to adjust, lie about it, and publicly defame the devs, basically make it literally impossible for the company to stay in business, should Christian have threatened to kill spez? I think no.
If instead of that, they destroy your whole industry, so that you literally can’t work as a software dev anymore, at your game company or any other or in any other software-related industry, and you have to retrain yourself to something totally different, should you threaten them with death? At that point I think it’s a little more of a tactical decision rather than a moral one, because they are crossing that line into “Fuck the system this is wrong” territory, but I would still argue that literally waging war on them wouldn’t accomplish as much as trying to get your democratic government to address the issue some other way.
If instead of that, they created an economic system so that it was impossible for you to get any job, software or otherwise, except back-breaking physical work with a high chance of maiming or killing you, and you still got starvation wages, should you threaten them with death? At that point, maybe; that’s the point we were at in the late 1800s and it’s hard to say it was wrong to fight a small war about it. At that point it’s more about tactics, and the workers in the 1800s didn’t have a tiny fraction of the democratic power you do, so they went to literal war and for the most part it worked in the end.
If instead of that, they ruined your economy and your government, made it so you had no voting rights, could be abused or killed by members of the government of a different racial group who were all super racist against you, so you had the starvation wages and the unsafe labor conditions and also unsafe conditions outside of work and no way out economically and no real democratic way to address the situation, is it appropriate to threaten them with death? At that point, definitely not. Again, blacks in the US and Indians in British India faced that situation, and they decided the only way out was through nonviolent resistance.
Again, I’m not trying to tell you to do nothing. I’m saying death threats are a silly and unproductive thing to do in this case. Somewhere here I posted a video of a guy in Walgreens who felt the policeman was being unfair and got super loud about it to resolve the situation. Death threats, in this situation, I think are gonna have pretty much that level of effectiveness.
If your whole rant is about the death threats I think you missed the point. Because I wasn’t making a point about the death threats. I was pointing out that this particular business model they’re introducing could literally cause the creator of a game to go broke trying to pay it depending on the popularity of their product. That’s broken. And Unity should have known it was broken. And saying they’ve had credible death threats after announcing this plan is to me the same as what Spez did with Reddit after he did the AMA for his API increase and expected no backlash.
I will say this though. I’d rather have death threats that no one follows through with that are “credible” and change a company’s behaviour than have to riot in the streets. Rioting causes a lot of collateral damage to people and places that are not involved. Historically though, the elite create systems where violence slowly but surely becomes the only avenue for change. I’m not saying this is one of them. I am saying this is capitalism and the reason everything is the way it is in the world right now. Rich people wanting to get richer at the expense of poor people.
I was pointing out that this particular business model they’re introducing could literally cause the creator of a game to go broke trying to pay it depending on the popularity of their product. That’s broken. And Unity should have known it was broken.
Yeah, agreed.
Rioting causes a lot of collateral damage to people and places that are not involved. Historically though, the elite create systems where violence slowly but surely becomes the only avenue for change. I’m not saying this is one of them. I am saying this is capitalism and the reason everything is the way it is in the world right now. Rich people wanting to get richer at the expense of poor people.
Yeah, 100% agreed. That’s why I keep talking about real economic injustice and how I feel about it, even though I think applying those tools to this specific situation is way unnecessary.
If your whole rant is about the death threats I think you missed the point. Because I wasn’t making a point about the death threats.
I think you may be the exception then. We’re talking under a headline about death threats, and the reason I was a little salty about it was that it seems like there are a bunch of people here who genuinely think death threats are a good response to this situation, and to me that’s pretty nutty.
If I’m reading this message from you right, we’re pretty much in agreement: This is a sorta shitty situation, and sometimes genuine economic injustice demands radical solutions, but at the end of the day this is a pretty minor issue.
I will say this though. I’d rather have death threats that no one follows through with that are “credible” and change a company’s behaviour than have to riot in the streets.
You do realize that this is exactly how these MAGA hard-core faithfuls think, right? “Well if you’re going to run your bakery / social media company / election in a way I don’t like, I’ll threaten to kill you, because at the end of the day if you change your behavior that’s justified”? You kinda lost me again with this one.
“But under the changes announced today, Unity Personal and Unity Pro users will pay fees if they hit $200,000 in revenue in a year and 200,000 lifetime installs. For anywhere from one to a million installs, those users will pay 20 cents per install. “It’s a price increase.”
If I have a mobile game selling for $1 on the apple store for instance and it uses Unity, and has has a million downloads/installs I then owe Unity $200,000 for an app that I didn’t even make $500,000 on because app stores like apple’s charge a 30% cut, sales exist, and it says installs which may mean a person buys the app once and installs it on more than one device. But that doesn’t in any way directly affect my livelihood as a developer or anything. Right?
But there are commercial entity, it’s their right to do so, with thebway thebcurrent laws and market is setup. “The free market will remove them from the equation if they’re not offering an attractive product at an attractive rate, in the face of competitors offering such”… in theory. In practice, I say fuck em. Stop using unity. Stop playing games made in unity. Let them die. A better offering will appear when they are off the table.
AFAIK, the retroactive nature of it doesn’t apply to already released games, but to games released with the new license terms. So if you released that mobile game last year, you wouldn’t need to pay $200k or whatever next year. However, if you release that same game next year, you would have to retroactively pay that $200k once the downloads exceeded the stated max.
So the solution is: don’t use Unity next year, especially if you’ll be selling a game for $1. It sucks since in-progress games would have to be reworked, and Unity should suffer for that, but it shouldn’t ever come to threats of violence.
That’s actually fair. But the point is that the popularity of a game could tank a developer with this business model. It could also affect past profits and purchases specifically because of the bit about downloads. It doesn’t differentiate between a user who’s downloaded a paid app on 6 different phones, 1 phone, 1000 phones. So if I for instance paid for I dunno Plants vs Zombies one time, the developer releases it with an update patch, I and then downloaded it onto every phone I have had since then or will have in the future that could be 10,.15, 20 downloads over my lifetime. What if I have a work phone? They’re not saying they can’t implement this even with old games. I don’t think they meant retroactively. I think they mean new installs of old games that have updates.
I guess I’d have to read through the contract, but generally these things only apply to games released after the new terms take effect, but updates to games released prior. So the dev would be fully aware of the policy at the point of releasing the game.
Unity seems to be catering to games with a recurring revenue model (ads, microtransactions, etc), and discouraging other revenue models, and I think most developers will recognize that with this pricing model.
So I don’t think Unity is trying to screw already released games, they’re just trying to limit their appeal to a certain type of game revenue model.
If software you use changes their pricing in a way that, in three month’s time, because you made only $500k last year and your game uses a freemium model such that you get a shitload of installs but don’t necessarily draw revenue from every install, so that that 20c per install adds up to the fact that you’ll be losing money come January, should you threaten the people at that software company with death? At that point, I think no.
If instead of that, they do something more akin to what Reddit did to the Apollo devs, and change the pricing such that they don’t have time to adjust, lie about it, and publicly defame the devs, basically make it literally impossible for the company to stay in business, should Christian have threatened to kill spez? I think no.
If instead of that, they destroy your whole industry, so that you literally can’t work as a software dev anymore, at your game company or any other or in any other software-related industry, and you have to retrain yourself to something totally different, should you threaten them with death? At that point I think it’s a little more of a tactical decision rather than a moral one, because they are crossing that line into “Fuck the system this is wrong” territory, but I would still argue that literally waging war on them wouldn’t accomplish as much as trying to get your democratic government to address the issue some other way.
If instead of that, they created an economic system so that it was impossible for you to get any job, software or otherwise, except back-breaking physical work with a high chance of maiming or killing you, and you still got starvation wages, should you threaten them with death? At that point, maybe; that’s the point we were at in the late 1800s and it’s hard to say it was wrong to fight a small war about it. At that point it’s more about tactics, and the workers in the 1800s didn’t have a tiny fraction of the democratic power you do, so they went to literal war and for the most part it worked in the end.
If instead of that, they ruined your economy and your government, made it so you had no voting rights, could be abused or killed by members of the government of a different racial group who were all super racist against you, so you had the starvation wages and the unsafe labor conditions and also unsafe conditions outside of work and no way out economically and no real democratic way to address the situation, is it appropriate to threaten them with death? At that point, definitely not. Again, blacks in the US and Indians in British India faced that situation, and they decided the only way out was through nonviolent resistance.
Again, I’m not trying to tell you to do nothing. I’m saying death threats are a silly and unproductive thing to do in this case. Somewhere here I posted a video of a guy in Walgreens who felt the policeman was being unfair and got super loud about it to resolve the situation. Death threats, in this situation, I think are gonna have pretty much that level of effectiveness.
If your whole rant is about the death threats I think you missed the point. Because I wasn’t making a point about the death threats. I was pointing out that this particular business model they’re introducing could literally cause the creator of a game to go broke trying to pay it depending on the popularity of their product. That’s broken. And Unity should have known it was broken. And saying they’ve had credible death threats after announcing this plan is to me the same as what Spez did with Reddit after he did the AMA for his API increase and expected no backlash.
I will say this though. I’d rather have death threats that no one follows through with that are “credible” and change a company’s behaviour than have to riot in the streets. Rioting causes a lot of collateral damage to people and places that are not involved. Historically though, the elite create systems where violence slowly but surely becomes the only avenue for change. I’m not saying this is one of them. I am saying this is capitalism and the reason everything is the way it is in the world right now. Rich people wanting to get richer at the expense of poor people.
Yeah, agreed.
Yeah, 100% agreed. That’s why I keep talking about real economic injustice and how I feel about it, even though I think applying those tools to this specific situation is way unnecessary.
I think you may be the exception then. We’re talking under a headline about death threats, and the reason I was a little salty about it was that it seems like there are a bunch of people here who genuinely think death threats are a good response to this situation, and to me that’s pretty nutty.
If I’m reading this message from you right, we’re pretty much in agreement: This is a sorta shitty situation, and sometimes genuine economic injustice demands radical solutions, but at the end of the day this is a pretty minor issue.
You do realize that this is exactly how these MAGA hard-core faithfuls think, right? “Well if you’re going to run your bakery / social media company / election in a way I don’t like, I’ll threaten to kill you, because at the end of the day if you change your behavior that’s justified”? You kinda lost me again with this one.
I don’t agree with the Maga statement. Mostly because from what I have seen they actually are frothing at the mouth for violence.