- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5340114
ghostarchive
Original Discussion[1]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.
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deleted by creator
Even better than fake, it’s self-inflicted.
The fact that Unity board of directors haven’t fired the CEO shows that they are A-OK with this.
This is the problem with the shareholder mentality that’s ruining a lot of products and services. They don’t give a damn about the longevity of the company. They only care about money now; and as soon as things go sour, they’ll sell their shares and move on to the next company.
There should be law forcing major players in the market to commit for 10 years + when they buy shares above a certain threshold and when those 10+ years pass they should be forced to justify when selling. Might be dumb but just saying as things are the market/system will just rot on the daily. Shits corrupted to the core imo.
IPOs usually come out with something like that, investors who commit to not sell their shares for half a year or maybe a year. After that… it’s each one for their own.
deleted by creator
Honestly, they’re probably in on it. Greed is all this is.
Absolutely, that’s why they all sold their stocks before they announced this
I know that execs have time windows they have to be in to buy and sell their stocks, and it has to be planned months in advance, but a massive TOS change like this doesn’t happen overnight or without buy in all the way to the top. They absolutely planned this, and I hope the SEC nails their asses to the wall over it.
yeah I’ll admit i don’t know much about how all this stufd works, but thanks to others i also found out about these rules. But imo those time windows are absolutely useless in preventing insider trading if they plan to do both things in the same time window anyways
That, or an easy day off work.
I’m sure they’re gonna be getting many days off work now
They were working from another office per the article.
I’ve been working on an indie game project for several years now and invested thousands of dollars into it. Fortunately, I had the foresight to use Godot for it, but if I’d used Unity instead I’d be completely screwed right now. Hell, I’m still using the 3.X branch of Godot because I figured that migrating everything to version 4 would be more trouble than it’s worth. Going to a completely new engine at this stage in development would be completely out of the question.
Good luck with your game! Is it something public we could contribute to?
No, it’s a commercial release. I’d been doing everything with placeholder art throughout most of development but I’ve recently commissioned some artists for some professional assets, and I think I’ll have enough to put together some screenshots and a demo video and get a page on Steam, etc. set up within the next few weeks.
It’s a Metroidvania with influences from cinematic platformers (Another World, Flashback) and immersive sims (System Shock, Deus Ex.)
I’m sorry to stifle your expectations, but if you’re working on that project on your own, you’re very unlikely to reach the 200k/year revenue necessary to trigger this new pricing scheme.
Could be stock options as well. I’d be shitty if part of my compensation was stock and I saw blatant mismanagement taking place.
Three years ago after trying Unity for a month I chose to learn Godot instead. I see now how right that decision was. Well done past self. Have a future cookie.
I wish I could bribe past me with future cookies…
Leave one out overnight and tell your present self that they can have it in the future if they do x before tomorrow. If you succeed, then you get a cookie. If you fail, eat the cookie anyway. At least you tried.
Soooooooo it wasn’t “the gamers” making the credible threats after all, even if I wouldn’t put it past the gaming community to make threats of this nature.
What even is “the gaming community” anymore? Basically everyone except boomers play games.
What is a community? Recommended reading: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.
…There’s probably an ecological definition for “community” that you could try to transfer over… I think in cases where a large group of individuals don’t actually interact with all of each other either directly or indirectly, but are nonetheless relevant as a grouping because they share a particularly contextually prominent set of traits (E.G. “Plays Video Games”), then “population” might be a more appropriate term (if a bit sterile).
I think it is more than just people who plays games. It’s more people who play games and participate in community, which is a smaller percentage, though still probably quite big
I’m not sure if anyone at Unity ever accused the gamers, we all just jumped to the conclusion because that’s exactly the kind of thing the scene would do.
I’m pretty sure back when I made games, it wasn’t Unity employees sending me unhinged tantrums because a number was changed from an 11 to a 12.
Why would Unity go against the gamers? They are the one who are going to generate installations.
Maybe Unity thought it would be a good way to make some noise and keep Unity in people’s mouths.
The inverted Oscar Slap, that was supposed to keep the object’s name out of people’s mouths.
Why would anyone be surprised?
That Unity employee could have been put up to make those threats to smear the policy’s detractors for all we know.
That’s an implausible take. Loyal employees wouldn’t go for such a ploy and disgruntled employees … well, conceivably would take such action on their on volition.
True. They also could’ve just lied.
I wonder if/when someone can FOIA the police records. I really want to know now
A nice company has a great product and is well liked by its customers.
New executive manager comes in and thinks “how can I quickly get a huge bonus”? The answer always is implement new changes that will tuin the company in a year and a half, but that manager will have received his bonuses and is gone, leaving the company in ruins.
I can’t say 100% for sure that this is what happened, but whenever something like this happens, it’s just somebody deciding they want a quick buck
I dont understand how the board allows this behaviour, how do they not interween when an executive clearly is abusing the terms of the contract at the expense of the conpany
They know exactly what they’re doing.
They’ve been collecting metrics for months and plugging them into spreadsheets to figure out exactly how profitable this will be, just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.
They knew it would be incredibly unpopular. They knew it would likely kill the company one day.
But the spreadsheet doesn’t care about any of that so neither do they. They sold off stocks then made the announcement.
When the changes go live, they’ll squeeze everything they can out of successful projects, who will be left in a position of “losing 50% to Unity is better than losing 100% from pulling the game”.
They’ll stuff their pockets with us much of that money as they can and when the spreadsheet tells them to, they’ll pull the plug and strip the company for parts.
It was the best thing for them and that was all that mattered.
Not to mention money can be made litteraly betting on the stock price swinging from the bad news. Calls and puts plan far enough in advance and automate/preset triggers via broker agreements and can even avoid getting nailed for the obvious insider trading a lot of the time.
This shit should be illegal. If it isn’t already.
Destroying a company for your own personal gain is why America is falling under
It’s not going to change as long as the only people to vote for are “red neoliberals” or “blue neoliberals”.
They also made the announcement right after an iPhone announcement. Unfortunately, the iPhone was completely underwhelming, so the news didn’t get buried like they probably expected.
The executive was hired by the board or with the board support (CEO usually)
They did exactly what they wanted
They don’t give a shit if someone sinks the ship because they already have their lifeboat ready.
The stakeholders want to cash out. A temporary bump to increase the company’s value with no regard for future prospects is great for them.
$$$
This scheme worked fine for thousands before him, so clearly board members are not an issue, presumably because they benefit from it.
They should not be getting death threat from employees. They should be getting legal threats from the SEC, and prosecuted for insider trading.
Should should should should should
Nothing works within our government anymore.
And as shit goes down because no one enforces corporate, the rest of us suffer the consequences.
When upper managemeny does stock selloffs before sabotaging the value of the company, it generates distrust in the whole market if they are not prosecuted. Traders stop buying and the economy goes into recession.
I thought after some initial inflammatory headlines, ultimately the stock sale was a periodically scheduled sale. Has information on that changed?
Fun thing is though, if it’s a regular scheduled thing and you schedule your burn-shit-down announcement until after, wellllll…
I mean I guess you could time it once like that, but if that’s your plan, you could have just sold it all a year before you planned on tanking the stock when you set up the schedule and make more money. Or just not tank the stock.
Por que no los dos?
“an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media”
Wow. That’s… probably against their internal social media policy.
HR won’t take kindly to that on their annual performance review.
“The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you… but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive.”
There won’t be another annual review if the company stops existing
Problem solved!
I can just see their PR team last night planning to spin Unity as a victim after the death threat, in an effort to stop the bleeding, only to find out it was one of their own employees.
the call is coming from INSIDE the house?!?!
Yeah it’s even worse than that. They knew it was from one of their employees but chose not to release that information because “PR”.
They can go spin on it.
Seriously, tf is going on over there at Unity?
People with passion wanted to work on a great project only to see how the vision was corrupted and turned into a monster.
Like, the regular employee isn’t excited about shit changes either.
I don’t think “regular employee” should be used anywhere close to this story lol. Imagine your passion project being building something for someone else and when that gets upset you resort to death theeats against your employer? Jesus.
Edit: Lol when this story first came out the consensus here was that death threats were not cool, now that it’s an employee everyone is sympathetic? Alright, let’s spin this story to fit our bias, why not!
Maybe it’s different people with different opinions replying
That’s ignoring voting though, which is a good way to get the average sentiment of a community regardless of who is doing the commenting. Is it more likely that the community’s average opinion of death threats flipped overnight or that the new information changed the average opinion?
That’s a fair point.
I’m okay so long as they just kill the execs.
Either someone hates to see their company burn to the ground and responded in an extremely immature way, or a higher up went “let’s get this public town hall canceled in a way that people feel sorry for us. SIMMONS! MAKE A DEATH THREAT NOW!”
The former seems the most likely, but I always hold out hope that it’s middle management being a dumbass as corporate’s gonna corporate
Oh, I imagine working conditions there have gotten worse in recent times, too. The kind of leadership that fucks over their clients like this don’t start with those clients. They treat everyone as a resource to be exploited, and employees are the ones they can abused most readily.
The public furor over the pricing model is the opportunity, not the motive.
The CEO and his cronies don’t understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.
However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it’s dominance among other things because it’s an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would’ve otherwise had trouble getting into development.
Be passionate about your work! Right up to the point where you start disagreeing with how I am bastardising it… then you can fuck off.
If you’re doing something you love for a company you’re gonna have a bad time.
Are you working something you hate?
A lot of people are fine working what they love for a company, surely there are issues, but not all companies are batshit and ruin their product.
It’s not so black and white though. Passion jobs are often exploited because people will put up with it more and there is higher demand for those types of jobs.
Your best bet is to find something that is interesting and nice enough to keep you content and not bored to death but not so enthralling that you feel like working unpaid overtime or what ever. Bonus points if it’s paid relatively well.
They are rebranding to Disunity.
Division, ironically
*insert picture of cat in overalls scouting over snow bank
Removed by mod
Or to get out of work.
I highly doubt we’ll get an answer to that question
Seems like unity knew it was an employee from the start and told the police as much, so probably the second
As always is the case. It’s a pr stunt
Didn’t we call this yesterday? I am certain I saw multiple posters on here predicting pretty much exactly this.
Yeah, it sounded weird that it would be a gamer or developer, much less any “fan” of unity.
I had assumed it was a fabricated threat that came from “inside the house.” Now it looks like it was a real threat from inside. I can’t condone what the employee said, but I can sympathize with their plight. Not to mention that of all Indie devs whose workflows have likely been uprooted by Unity’s selfish move.
Yea this is a textbook PR stunt to look like the victims and people still buy it.
Based
And death threat pilled
https://youtu.be/KTa6fWgl7us?si=gotlanLsDBHSrT0c Hank: Peggy, it’s for you. It’s Dale. Peggy: Hello Dale Dale: YOU DONT KNOW WHO I AM BUT I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
Pocket sand!
This has been a hell of a week for Unity.
As requested by the CEO for cover.
