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.”
They really want to kill themselves.
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Children’s hospital are actually a more legally challenging claim that they’re not charities, at least in some cases (edit: I did not check if that specific hospital is legally a charity).
But PP is classified as a charity at the federal level. If you give cash to PP, you can claim the amount you gave as a gift to a charity. That’s all you need to know.
So when they say charity, they don’t actually mean charity. They mean some weird shit that they’re making up. Because there’s a legal definition of “charity” and PP is part of it.
Mood
I mean Planned Parenthood is explicitly NOT a charity. It’s an ineffective Political Action Committee that spent decades bilking donations and wasn’t even able to codify roe v wade. They don’t deserve shit. Hospitals in the US are also explicitly not Charities. They may be non-profits, maybe, but they don’t run on donations, they expect payments from patients for services rendered. There is no world where those examples of the failures of a Capitalist society should be considered a charity.
Except they’re literally a charity.
There’s a PAC of the name but Planned Parenthood proper is a 501©(3).
Yeah, and Michael Jordan isn’t a former basketball player, he’s an actor! And don’t try to tell me that’s a different person, because nothing can ever be named the same as another thing!
So if Unity said Michael Jordan is not a valid basket ball player, would you be up in arms about it?
No, because it wouldn’t affect anything. Withholding money from a valid charity does.
What if their definition of a “valid charity” doesn’t agree with yours?
The federal government decides what a valid charity is, not them.
Why? Is there some law they are breaking by having their own opinion of what a valid charity is?
Lol could Unity have bungled this any harder??
But they don’t want to cure cancer - they want to turn people into dinosaurs!
I get this.
I don’t
Why does this sound like the plot of the amazing Spider-Man movie
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.
Unity is working on hanging itself
Bankruptcy any%
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’
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.
Taking a play from the budlight playbook.
Lol, k
Devs may as well bite the bullet & switch engines mid development now, because I’m not buying any new games made in Unity.
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.
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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.
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.
Yup. I’m not either.
🤦♀️
🤦🤦
Calling PP a political org is too obtuse a message to view this response as a simple mistake or miscommunication. Unity is apparently run by conservative hacks and I hope they collapse.
Christian nationalists will never be content unless they have complete domination
This isn’t generic conservatism. Many Americans, who are conservative, support abortion rights. Unity seems to be in bed with far right political Christianity.
*Christianity." Not too be confused with other types of Christianity. There’s a lot of them, and while I am not any of them, it is important to be accurate.
They very specifically said political Christianity to be fair
Well as if it wasn’t already obvious they were headed by conservatives…
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.
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.
The unity CEO is an arsonist as he’s set ablaze the whole company. Guy should be investigated for fraud and malfeasance.
he is challenging Elon Musk to a fuck (up) off. who can burn a company to the ground faster.
I think the Unity CEO is winning, but hard to tell, because next to Twitter, Musk is also fucking with Tesla and SpaceX
musk is going for the hat-trick
Sorry, but Elon is about 40 billion in the red compared to this guy so I think he’s got Unity bosses beat by a lot.
Yes, but the unity guy is causing seismic shift in the gaming industry that is having cascading effects. Then again, musk is going for the quadruple axle of fucking shit up between Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and starlink.
And yet when he is inevitably asked to resign, after years of this shit-show, he’ll get yet another golden parachute. Stupidity fails upwards in the United States. And half of this country applaud it.
I mean one of them isn’t.
Yeah screw Michigan and it’s awful children.
