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Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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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.
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.