Unity: the soap opera continues… and it’s starting to suck!

[Mise à jour le 15/09/2023 à 15:37] The global outcry caused by the new pricing decided unilaterally by Unity is beginning to endanger the company’s employees.

As a reminder, the company which develops one of the most used video game creation engines in the world – and which will soon integrate AI – announced this week that games using Unity would now have to pay it a fee for each installation. Without additional service in return, or warning of such a change, developers around the world have unsurprisingly received the news very coolly, some going so far as to ask their audience to no longer download their games and to turn to alternatives such as Unreal Engine.

Faced with the reactions, the company wanted to clarify certain points, such as the fact that these fees would not apply in the event of reinstallation, and also backpedaled on others. Thus, contrary to the initial announcement, games included in charitable bundles and demo downloads will ultimately no longer be subject to fees. These latest announcements were far from calming the anger of developers, but also of players, to the point that company events had to be canceled, and two of its offices closed due to death threats “considered credible” by Unity Technologies, threats which in fact were confined to a post published by an employee of the firm on social networks.

A global outcry, and a real risk for employees

The very virulent reaction to this announcement, and at the global level, is getting worse every day. Indeed, John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity Technologies, was to address all of the company’s employees this Thursday to discuss what these changes in pricing policy imply. A meeting which was in turn canceled due to “threats received”.

These are also two of the company’s offices which had to be closed in a hurry. The company also told its employees that they could stay at home if they did not feel comfortable with the situation. We would be too.

Focus on John Riccitiello

John Riccitiello, in fact, concentrates a good part of the grievances of players and developers against this decision. He is in fact the current CEO of Unity, and probably at the origin of this new model. It must be said that his impressive career in the video game industry seems to show that he is not so much interested in gaming as in money. Previously director of EA, this is not his first backlash since, for the release of FIFA 09he had imposed the loot box model.

He also became famous for his statements, such as when he called developers ” fucking idiots » for not being comfortable with new monetization models, microtransactions in mind. He also proposed to shareholders to charge players a dollar for Battlefield every time… they reloaded their weapon in the game.

Finally, to complete the picture, he sold 2,000 shares of Unity just before the announcement of the new monetization, and the predictable fall in the company’s price. On this last point at least, it is not certain that justice will stand idly by.

Update : contrary to the information provided by the representative of Unity Technologies, the San Francisco police – who are investigating these death threats – have so far identified only one suspect, an employee of the company. Residing outside the state of California, the latter allegedly threatened to kill his employer on one of the many social networks on the web.

Source : The Verge, Yahoo Finance