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Unity reportedly told dev Planned Parenthood and children's hospital are "not valid charities" (www.gamesindustry.biz)

submitted 1 year ago by ram@lemmy.ca to c/gaming@lemmy.ml

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5555641

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Developers of indie puzzle game Orgynizer have claimed that Unity said organisations like Planned Parenthood are "not valid charities" and are instead "political groups."

In a blog post, the EU-based developer LizardFactory said the plans to charge developers up to $0.20 per install if they reach certain thresholds would cost them "around 30% of the funds we have gathered and already sent to charity."

As Unity clarified the runtime fee will not apply to charity games, LizardFactory reached out to the company to clarify their game would be exempt from the plan.

However, Unity reportedly said their partners were not "valid charities" and were viewed as "political groups."

Profits made from the game go directly to non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, Michigan.

"We did this to raise money for a good cause, not to line the coffers of greedy scumbags," the developers wrote in a blog post. "We have been solid Unity fanboys for over ten years, but the trust is scattered all over the floor."

The developers are considering a move to open-source game engine Godot, "but we will have to recode our entire game because we refuse to give you a dime," they wrote. "This is a mafia-style shakedown, nothing more, nothing less."

Today, Unity responded to the ongoing backlash and apologised, acknowledging the "confusion and angst" surrounding the runtime fee policy.

The company has promised that changes to the policy will be shared in "a couple of days."

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[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 76 points 1 year ago

Wow. Unity are committing suicide in record time.

[-] Aquila@sh.itjust.works 49 points 1 year ago

This is what happens when a game engine is bought by an advertising company

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Sigh...

[-] flux@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago

I don't see an official statement but it would be really amazing for a company that is asking everyone to follow the new rules to ignore the well established laws at the same time. They can have whatever opinions they want but these places are recognized as such.

"Some organizations must also file a request with the Internal Revenue Service to gain status as a tax-exempt non-profit charitable organization under section 501(c)(3) of the US tax code."

"Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc is a nonprofit organization It is a tax-exempt corporation under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3)"

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago

Why do I get the feeling this has ~~something~~ everything to do with the political inclinations of Unity execs?

[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

It's probably entirely due to the political shitstorm that would certainly follow.

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, they kinda started that by the statement already. They could have just limited it to a pre-approved list of charities, but instead, by not calling it a charity, in direct contradiction with US law, they've dragged themselves further into the clusterfuck, as if that were somehow possible.

[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml -4 points 1 year ago

I don't think you can consider denying their tax exempt status on the same level of political shit-flinging as actively funding their work.

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

So denying them isn't political, but approving them is? Got it.

[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml -3 points 1 year ago

That doesn't even resemble what I said.

[-] hsr@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 year ago

Unity executives kind of forgot they can't change US law on a whim like they changed their Terms Of Service.

[-] Jaysyn@kbin.social 29 points 1 year ago

Devs may as well bite the bullet & switch engines mid development now, because I'm not buying any new games made in Unity.

[+] mojo@lemm.ee -29 points 1 year ago

Game's made in Unity have literally nothing to do with this, that makes no sense

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

Yeah, you're just being willingly daft. How the bloody hell do you not see the readily apparent connection?

[+] mojo@lemm.ee -18 points 1 year ago

Because it's a tool, game development is a huge investment, there's really not many alternatives, and if you think Godot is an alternative, you have zero gamedev experience. You have to be straight up ignorant to believe that completely unrelated game developers are somehow supporting this, and have zero basis in reality to think they can swap engines on the drop of a hat.

[-] BleatingZombie@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

I don't think anybody claimed they could do it "at the drop of a hat". They're saying it would be financially beneficial for these game developers to take the financial hit to jump ship from Unity because people will be less likely to buy Unity games

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

This is precisely my point, and why the OC resorted to ad hominem almost out of the gate is beyond me. That said, I do have a bit of experience in game development, and I think the short term gains from Unity would be outweighed by the losses incurred through negative PR and Unity's stunts.

[-] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

The fact that you don't recognize Godot as a viable alternative just proves you don't actually have any dev experience yourself

[+] mojo@lemm.ee -8 points 1 year ago

Uh huh, Godot doesn't have any texture/mesh/animation/audio streaming, has no access to low level rendering structures, lacks significant optimizations, lacks swarm logic, complete lack of mature tools, no paid asset/extension store, miles behind shader editing and vfx effects. Which part of these are wrong, and do you understand why these things are required for big games?

[-] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I didn't say it was feature parity with Unity, 90% of Unity games don't require most of the features Unity has that Godot lacks.

Streaming is not the only solution to efficiently loading assets

The VFX is not lacking from Unity in anyway other than not having Unity's specific tools for organizing them, the Shader and VFX graph. It lacks access to the stencil buffer right now, but not much else. You can still make any shader in Godot that you can make in Unity.

W4 is opening a dedicated paid store.

Godot can run native C++, making it more optimized than Unity in several areas. DOTS can out do it in some areas, but again native C++ is still faster.

You have direct access to Godot's render pipeline code so no idea what you mean by 'low level', no idea how'd you get lower level than direct access to the render pipeline itself.

[-] mojo@lemm.ee -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Streaming is required for a lot of use cases, it's probably the most important of everything I listed. Godot is miles behind even Unity in fidelity still. "Opening a paid store" still means it currently does not exist and also means there's zero assets for actual purchase. Running native c++ has literally nothing to do with Engine optimization lol. That's also just false, you don't have access to the rendering server even from gdextension.

This isn't coming from me btw, this is coming from the literal creator of Godot, so you're disagreeing with him here. Really shows you how deep into the circlejerk we are here lol. https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/

edit: nice the guy who calls me cringe blocks me after replying so he can't be called out for being wrong. Maybe don't be so argumentative when you reply and don't know what you're talking about. How toxic.

[-] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Edit, I didn't block him, he's being a troll I guess.

Firstly, I can tell you only skimmed that and haven't actually read it because it contradicts multiple points you made in this and the previous comment. Like, actually read it before trying to use it as a source.

"Everyone who disagrees with me is circle jerking"

Lol, okay buddy. You're a tad bit cringe

Like, "As such, this means that low level access to all the rendering server structures needs to be exposed via GDExtension." Says it right there, in the page you linked. "Often developers need to implement rendering techniques, post processing effects, etc. that don’t come bundled with the engine." You have to do some of it yourself, which means ITS VIABLE. Again, not on parity, but viable. Again, not feature complete, not as polished, but viable.

And on streaming "Of the above, most are relatively straightforward to implement", meaning that users can already do this, the article even mentions how much of the ground work is just handed to you. I'm not arguing the point on if this should be fully implemented by the dev team to come fully prepackaged, im simply telling you that you're wrong about godot not being viable. It should come by default, but it's still easy to do. Again, if your point is it should come default, I agree with that.

I can tell you're just being argumentive for the sake of it, so I'm just going to ignore you from here on out. You aren't adding anything constructive and you're not capable of reading something YOU linked, so you're not worth the time or effort.

I remember when I first started using Unity years and years ago and people like you would just talk shit about it non stop. I remember when I started using blender in middle school and people like you should just talk shit about it.

[-] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

I didn't block you, you're the one being toxic

[-] Empricorn@feddit.nl 25 points 1 year ago

Is Unity a Republican? They seem to want to be greedy and wrong at every possible opportunity...

[-] Teodomo@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

I mean, nowadays I assume almost all C-suite execs (which make these decisiones) to be conservative (or "apoliticals"/"insert other tag" that act like conservatives)

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

You don't get to their position by being a caring, empathetic person.

[-] SatouKazuma@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

110% they are. Even want to force women to carry ectopic pregnancies to term, apparently.

[-] Chailles@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Regardless of any political machinations, this is Unity being given a choice between making more money and making less money. Unsurprisingly, they claim that they're choosing to make more money.

[-] mayo@lemmy.today 4 points 1 year ago

Political or not a non-profit is a non-profit. Unity defines charity some new way I guess.

[-] Ductos@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago

@ram Fucking EXCUSE ME?!

[-] ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gaming community will now approach every little thing at unity like the end of the world rather than middle management not knowing when to escalate a gap in policy, miscommunication, or just a dumb single person making a dumb call.

this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023

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