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.
I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t developers sending death threats but “gamers.”
Why would they do that? They are not directly impacted by this. Developers losing years of work have much more reason to be super angry.
Ever been in a game forum where the players pretty much worship the developers as if they were gods? It’s way too common. Those people can get crazy protective when they make it part of their identity.
Nope, but I can imagine that to some degree.
Despite that, I doubt gamers are very involved in payment methods of game engines, or even know which game engine their games are running on.
So unless some VERY popular game developers have been out saying expansions for their favorite games will not be released because of this, I don’t see the mechanics for what you claim working at this point.
Actually, they are talking about canceling silk song, and expansion for hollow Knight that has been in development for ages now, simply because they are looking at the possibility that the game will have to be delisted in order to avoid bankrupting the developer
Depending how it’s implemented, gamers are absolutely impacted by it.
Some of the chatter is that even already-released games would be subject to this change, meaning a lot of devs might pull their backlog to avoid going broke on a game they put out years ago and is now free (or heavily reduced). Or games that have always been free, now the dev has to choose if they want to charge for a historically free game or pull it completely.
This is dev hostile, but it’s also consumer hostile.
I 100% agree on this, I’ve even made a post about it, where I mention for instance that this will cause a need for more DRM where we need less.
I’m not saying it isn’t gamers, but unlike you, I find it unlikely. You may be right IDK.
I never said I found either option likely, I was only addressing the “this doesn’t impact gamers” bit.
I wrote DIRECTLY, of course they are impacted, but 99% don’t know that, of the remaining 1% 99% don’t care.
While for developers 100% both know and care.
Maybe you know, but what happens if a dev pulls a game and someone still has the installer and installs the game? Are they going to charge for that still? It makes not sense to me.
Unity clearly didn’t think this part through- probably because they never intended it to do anything but rake in money as the company dies. They never had a real way of precisely tracking downloads, but they want all the info so they can decide how much to charge. So would they charge on a local installer? Almost certainly if they could find out it was used.
There already Indie devs that are talking about delisting their games in order to avoid paying Unity fees they can’t afford.
This contract changes criminal, especially since it punishes the developer for no fault of its own. Sometimes I have to reinstall a game multiple times in order to figure out why it suddenly doesn’t work. I’m not the only one, that’s going to rack up fast.
And if you think review bombing is bad now? I imagine people buying the game not to leave a negative review, but you run a script that continuously reinstalls and uninstall the game.
They could bankrupt any developer they wanted to. Hell, it might not even be the gamers, if a company with a game on Unity doesn’t want to make it epic exclusive, Tim Sweeney has the choice to just continuously reinstall that game in order to sink any company that doesn’t play ball
Which game devs are they? I want to know which games I should buy now before it’s too late?
The same way people who aren’t directly affected by people being queer threaten to bomb places that host drag events.
Some people are just assholes.
See my other comments, it was neither. It was a single employee at their company. Not sure how long that’ll stay true though, especially when it comes out that he made it seem like there were death threats being sent to him when it was a single employee making threats. Probably just so he could close the office.