cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5146089
I feel like this has been the trend lately.
Company announces something terrible, then they get back lash, then they slightly take a step back and try to pretend to be the good guys.
Like, they knew this would happen all along.
I am DONE with Epic.
Epic is Unreal not Unity, fair to be done with them as well, but for once they aren’t part of the problem here. Unfortunately this kinda gives Epic a huge advantage in the industry, as Unity was arguably one of the best competitors to Unreal, but even that gap has been getting wider for a while.
it really is that predictable
Last year they acquired a malware company (likely for their user tracking infrastructure), and the CEO sold a large part of his shares. They totally knew what would happen and they prepared everything since then.
oh, I’m pretty aware of the entire saga up to now. and the malware company created a malware suite in 2010, after which they did the typical PR spin of disavowing personal responsibility for by stating it was bad actors, and has kept their heads low in scummy digital advertising practices for about a decade up until 2022 when Unity brought them aboard to “synergize their tools” (paraphrased by me from the original announcement).
The current CEO was an ex-exec at EA that was taken on board at Unity at 2014, and another EA ex-exec also came over as Unity’s CFO in 2015 (who was replaced for ambiguous reasons sometime before 2020). 2014 was around the time when they made many small scummy changes, like stop giving out lifetime licenses and altering the ToS in regards to existing lifetime licenses, and minimize dev support for recently-expired subs, while at the same time starting their pattern of frequent smaller updates to the engine after moving to Unity 5 - instead of larger, less-frequent ones (to work into their minimization of expired-sub dev support). It was around the time I swore off their engine after spending years of my life on it.
If any of this is wrong, I’d appreciate being corrected with more updated info - The CEO stuff I’m acutely aware of, but the IronSource+Unity stuff was only tangential to that for me, and after I already cut ties. I just don’t like bringing all this up so frequently from how topical it’s become recently; it’s a sore spot.
and, a final thing to add, I haven’t come across any concrete evidence IronSource created malware since being caught, and haven’t seen any concrete evidence of Unity containing malware. I just assumed they merged with them for the spyware and analytics software they fostered since then. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t like Unity’s business practices, but I don’t want to hate them based on what could be lies spread by motivated actors.
Most expensive Epic advertisement.
Why are you done with Epic? They have not done anything wrong I as far as I know right now.
Although Unity and Epic are not related (other than both being companies that make a game engine), and Epic is not related to these Unity pricing changes, Epic has still done a lot of things “wrong”. Especially for gaming on Linux. A lot of games that are currently unplayable under Linux is due to kernel-level (rootkit) anti-cheats. Being the creators of EAC, Epic has actively been harming the compatibility of games on Linux. Developers “can enable Proton support”, but even Epic themselves in many of their own titles don’t enable this.
They haven’t pissed off the larger gaming industry to the point where everybody is moving off their platform/products, but they are still a greedy corporation. Remember the whole exclusives thing on the epic games store?
Makes sense, forgot about the anti-cheat part.
