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.”
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.