cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5555641
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.”
This is their downfall hiring that CEO and the leadership should be ashamed. I feel sorry for the employees who had no say in this and are being affected by their myopic choices.
I wish someone would put up a huge donation to Godot and offer to hire a number of these engine devs. I’m sure there’s a ton of talented devs who would be willing to take a pay cut to work on a more open alternative.
A bunch of people contributing a little bit each month would also be huge:
https://www.patreon.com/godotengine
- I’m not associated with the dev team, but I use Godot for my projects and send back some money voluntarily
Please use the Godot Development Fund so more of your contribution goes to Godot.
Thank you for the update! I’ll switch over <3
Lol could Unity have bungled this any harder??
So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’
Taking a play from the budlight playbook.
Lol, k
People still buy Lenovo laptops, Sony music, use Microsoft products and Google services.
No matter how loathsome and evil a company has acted towards their oysters, there will always be people who lined up to get shucked.
It’s slightly different when you show consumers you’re willing to screw them out of nowhere than when you show businesses that you’ll do so. People shake that stuff off as an annoyance because they aren’t dependant on those businesses behaving decently in order for them to keep the lights on. When a partner shows it could randomly kill your business at any moment for no good reason, you tend to realise the importance of disengaging from them.
Well I’m not going to buy any more Unity games, and I’m going to uninstall any Unity games I have. Fuck those guys.
Duolingo bird is going to be sad.
Starting to think unity doesn’t have a pr team
I think this is their PR team.
it’s a Profit Relations division
💩
Devs may as well bite the bullet & switch engines mid development now, because I’m not buying any new games made in Unity.
Yup. I’m not either.
I do not think this is a place for consumer action. It is good the devs are running their awareness campaign for gamers. If a dev releases a game made in Unity in 2025 it is because they have made the decision that it is the best course of action for their business. Maybe they have a B2P or subscription model that makes the runtime cost more sustainable over throwing out N years for development effort.
At the end of the day Unity is a business to business product. The developers are the customer, not the players. If Unity’s new pricing and business practices don’t make sense to developers then developers will no longer use it and Unity will fail without player intervention.
I don’t think your goal is to further hurt the devs. Boycotting games made with Unity is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The list of games I can’t buy is too damn long. Like anything else in the modern age you’re forced to support unethical business practices or withdraw from the industry altogether (if you even can).
Can buy games from EA or Activision/Blizzard/Microsoft/Xbox or Ubisoft, or anything made with Unity, or anything with Denuvo, or anything with anti-cheat, or anything that’s online-only. Did I leave anything out?
Steam Deck + boring indie games is what we’re left with until gamers get together and collectively stop supporting the atrocity that is modern gaming.
There are a lot of fun indie titles out there. Give it a chance.
This (Unity change not your statement) will be a shank at the back of most indie devs.
Right–the AAA studios will just consider if they should use Unreal or an in-house engine. They’ll put it all in a big spreadsheet and come to a conclusion.
Indie devs that are on Unity are going to get hurt by this scheme. They’ll also get hurt if you don’t buy their games because they’re in Unity. The choices here aren’t great.
The one thing is Unreal seems to have been preferred for a while now, anyway. Unity was already losing market share, and is now only going to accelerate that.
If you’re doing 2D, some devs have been actively documenting the migration from Unity to Godot to make things easier for others to follow suit.
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I can’t speak for the EU, but in the US charities are federally recognized and there are tax deductions available for donating to them. This being said, it depends on what specific “Planned Parenthood” you donate to.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) works to support health care providers at Planned Parenthood health centers across the country, educate the public on issues of reproductive and sexual health, and advocate for policy to expand access to health care. PPFA is a 501©(3) organization, and donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable under the law.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF) is the advocacy and political arm of Planned Parenthood, fighting to advance and expand access to sexual health care and defend reproductive rights. PPAF is a 501©(4) organization, and donations are not tax-deductible as a charitable contribution or business expense.
As if I needed another reason not to use Unity.
Elon Musk: I can kill Twitter within a few months.
Unity: Hold my beer!
Somehow, Twitter and Reddit are still going…
What does “still going” even mean? Nobody expects them to shutdown their business. Digg has not shutdown either to this day. Twitter is a blackboard screeching jungle jim for the reactionary leftists and rightwing dinguses, so it will have the activity. Reddit has plenty cat meme lovers that will continue to use it as long as they can argue against ChatGPT bots about how Russia and China are bad and America is good.
Right wing groups in the US made Planned Parenthood a political issue. It doesn’t make it a political organization.
I feel sorry for Unity because I want them to be profitable and all that. However, they have a greedy prick for a CEO and one of the dumbest change rollouts I’ve seen (Twitter has been crazy bad lately too) at this scale. It wipes away any empathy for them and makes you yearn for their collapse.
It’s absolutely not a charity.
That’s an associated PAC, not Planned Parenthood proper that’s a 501©(3).
I feel sorry for the employees, but ultimately the company chose the CEO it’s not like he turned up and forced himself on them or anything. They were really pleased when they announced him as well, as if he was going to be some kind of asset.
It’s the investors fault for having no business savvy. Sod em.
Oh, the investors have business savvy. They’re the ones driving these changes, and making a killing on the stock market as a result.
When they’re done, Unity will be a pile of rubble and they’ll move on to their next victim.
I mean one of them isn’t.
Yeah screw Michigan and it’s awful children.
planned parenthood is political yadda yadda yadda, but a children’s hospital?
It’s not some struggling hospital in a poor country, but an award-winning, Xbox-equipped premium institution in Michigan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.S._Mott_Children’s_Hospital
They obviously do good work and probably could use more money and, sure, I want sick children to have an Xbox, but I’d still feel misled by calling that ‘charity’.
It’s a registered 501c3. Whatever anybody’s opinions, it’s a legal charity.
Yes, it is. That’s a different planned parenthood.
Planned Parenthood delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of people worldwide. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. is a registered 501©(3) nonprofit under EIN 13-1644147. Donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable under the law.
There are no child hospitals in the Bible 😡😡😡/s
There is no commandment “Thou shalt save children”, duh.
Planned parenthood shouldn’t be political. In a few years drinking water well be seen as a policial statement against brawndo
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Seriously. I could see some right-wing shithead complaining about “evil” abortions, but who doesn’t wanna save the lives of post-pregnancy children? Oh, that’s right. Right-wing shitheads. As always.
And planned parenthood does WAY more than abortions. They save lives on the daily.
Idk why anyone trusts peddlers of proprietary bullshit
For real dude it’s really hard to feel bad for 2d game devs when an open source solution has been around for years.
It’s like the whole xitter situation. Why would you want to stay on a platform that so obviously doesn’t want you there? bUt MaStOdOn Is HaRd 🙄 grow up, move on, stop investing in capitalists ideas that only benefit you when it benefits them.
This is victim blaming. These devs already made those games and released them before Unity made these decisions.
I’ve been telling people not to tust proprietary software because, the only reason to keep things proprietary is to reserve the right to fuck over your customers.
Its like I told you not to play in traffic, but you chose to listen to the casket salesmen who benefit from your demise.
At some point it is the victims fault
I haven’t heard this argument before, and it’s VERY hardline, but it works and the analogy is good too.
I wasnt saying it to be mean, I’m just tired of people misappropriating their anger.
We collectively have the power to prevent this from ever happening again.
They chose to be a victim when they chose to support proprietary software.
unless all these people are now going around telling people not to use proprietary software, they are choosing to be victims again, and the only bad guy they can identify is you lol
Thanks this actually made me laugh. I know how people work. I knew I was gonna get down voted. I’m comfortable having controversial opinions.
The features of Twitter vs mastodon is close to 1:1, but Godot vs Unity is not even close.
The amount of time to learn to use Twitter or Mastodon is a few minutes. The amount of time to learn Godot or Unity is months getting going, and years to become an expert.
Twitter is something people use for entertainment and communication. Unity and Godot are literally people’s livelihood.
This comparison is just fucking awful. Your lack of empathy for people who have literally put months of man hours into projects based on existing tooling, business models, and licensing agreements, only to have a massive rug pulled out from under them is just pathetic. If you don’t feel bad, you’re a fucking asshole and that’s on you. Stop trying to justify it.
I know they are people’s livelihoods, but you’d think people would have chose a platform that supported that to begin with.
I have no empathy because Godot and other open source engines have been around for a while now but no one cared until the proprietary option became unviable.
Fine we’ll use Photoshop in our thought experiment. Say tomorrow adobe decides to charge a royalty per picture produced. Yes people have put millions of hours in learning Photoshop and producing pictures in Photoshop. The whole time gimp, Krita and various other open source photo editors existed and were developed with hardly any main stream support. I feel for the open source devs that never got any support until the masses’ proprietary developers decided they didn’t want to support them learning their platform anymore.
I don’t support unitys decisions but I look forward to Godot getting the support they have so long deserved. I also look forward to any game dev that uses godot and owns their game rather than rents the engine their game is built on.
I should say I know people that got burned by Adobe’s copic decision. Now hardly anyone I know uses it because they can’t afford to get burned by adobe again.
The anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric is the political part, not that they’d ever admit it. The children’s hospitals though? That’s new to me, and downright malevolent. Like Texas/Florida levels of evil right there.
🤦♀️
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