A Potential Earthquake in the Videogame Industry: UNITY Install Fees

[Ryujin]

No offense, but that's just more conspiracy-minded stuff. Just examine it closely ... no ability to verify any claims, talk of schemes, and, of course, the usual nefarious powers that collude on a scam with no paper trail. Which, if you know anything about strike suits ... is a dubious proposition at best. And I'm being kind.

Look, no one denies that there are certainly occasions when a failing company ends up getting bought out, and the executive team ends up getting a better deal than other stakeholders ... which is to say, that they get something, and everyone else gets bupkes. And that's unfair if you ask me. But that doesn't mean that they are actively trying to destroy value ... which gives them a WORSE deal. Instead, it's just a sad example of "Heads they win, tails they win less."

Anyway, I would highly recommend reading more sources about economics, and relying less on people at Reddit. IMO.

I've only seen that sort of thing work on a small scale. The president of a company where I was formerly employed was also CEO, and managed to make himself the First Secured Creditor by filing that he was "loaning" his own limited company several million dollars, of his private funds. He later used company funds to purchase several production facilities in (what was at the time) Czechoslovakia. Money could be funnelled into the country, however, it could not be retrieved. The company was upside-down and kept buying product/parts on credit terms, renegotiating credit terms, borrowing more money... Everyone was blindsided when the receivers walked in and closed everything down. I worked for the receivers for 3 days, performing inventory. The only monies fully paid out were to the president/CEO, as the First Secured Creditor. Most of the employees got nothing. The unsecured creditors got nothing. The first couple of banks got partial payment and the last couple got nothing. After the bankruptcy was complete he reopened the same business, incorporated under a different name, in the same building. Even ended up with most of the product, that he hadn't paid for.

(I got lucky. I was his service manager and quality control manager. He wanted to hire me back so he paid me what I was owed, in cash, and I gave him hand written receipts. I also filed with the Employment Standards Branch for vacation pay, termination pay, and missing wages the day after we shut down, not being stupid. He lost the hand written receipts. The pitbull at ESB went after him, personally, because of how he mixed personal and corporate funds. I got paid by him. The gov't gave me 2 weeks termination in lieu of notice, 2 weeks vacation pay that was owing, and 2 weeks severance on top of the 2.5 weeks pay that was owing at shutdown. The couple of people I advised to go to ESB also got similar.)

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I've only seen that sort of thing work on a small scale. The president of a company where I was formerly employed was also CEO, and managed to make himself the First Secured Creditor by filing that he was "loaning" his own limited company several million dollars, of his private funds. He later used company funds to purchase several production facilities in (what was at the time) Czechoslovakia. Money could be funnelled into the country, however, it could not be retrieved. The company was upside-down and kept buying product/parts on credit terms, renegotiating credit terms, borrowing more money... Everyone was blindsided when the receivers walked in and closed everything down. I worked for the receivers for 3 days, performing inventory. The only monies fully paid out were to the president/CEO, as the First Secured Creditor. Most of the employees got nothing. The unsecured creditors got nothing. The first couple of banks got partial payment and the last couple got nothing. After the bankruptcy was complete he reopened the same business, incorporated under a different name, in the same building. Even ended up with most of the product, that he hadn't paid for.

Oh, I know from financial skullduggery!

That said, when it comes to publicly traded companies, the type of issues are almost always different. It's always an attempt to make the company appear more valuable than it really is (see, e.g., Enron) so people can cash out on top. It's the smaller companies, private companies where you might see this type of self-dealing in which it is profitable to drive a company under while paying yourself out.

 

[Ryujin]

Oh, I know from financial skullduggery!

That said, when it comes to publicly traded companies, the type of issues are almost always different. It's always an attempt to make the company appear more valuable than it really is (see, e.g., Enron) so people can cash out on top. It's the smaller companies, private companies where you might see this type of self-dealing in which it is profitable to drive a company under while paying yourself out.

Or like Bre-X, the gold mining company with no gold. For years there was a head shop on Yonge Street, in downtown Toronto, where you could buy their bankruptcy worthless shares at a rate low enough that you could literally wallpaper a room with them, for about the cost of regular wallpaper.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

The conspiracy theories and outright weird takes on public companies used to annoy me, now I just find them funny.

 

[Scribe]

Look, no one denies that there are certainly occasions when a failing company ends up getting bought out, and the executive team ends up getting a better deal than other stakeholders ... which is to say, that they get something, and everyone else gets bupkes.

Its been over 10 years now, but I still remember the first time the company I work for was bought/sold.

The President brought us in, it was his start up originally, everyone was in this conference hall, and he went on this long speech about how proud he was that the goal he had set to retire before he was 40 was finally going to be achieved.

He walked with 10's of millions, the rest of us? Zip.

Karma kind of caught up when he tried to go into politics, and was bodied on twitter, but then again, he has 10's of millions...so...

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

An open letter to our community | Unity Blog

An open letter from Marc Whitten to the Unity community in September 2023.

blog.unity.com

Taking it all back, we're so sorry, here's some more sensible guidelines, so it now mostly targets the bigger money makers using the 2024 version of Unity.

Look, I know companies do the whole 'threaten community with the worst outcome, act like you react to community wishes by presenting new terms that are what you wanted all along' dance routine, but there's levels to even that. You don't start with coming to someone's house and murdering their dog. Sometimes bad executive decisions are just that.

I hate the position they've put small and mid-sized developers in. Now they don't have to worry about their old/current projects (which they never should have had to!), but... they have to decide whether they waste a lot of time switching engines for their next game, or trust this clown show to not do something like this again in the future.

 

[Scribe]

An open letter to our community | Unity Blog

An open letter from Marc Whitten to the Unity community in September 2023.

blog.unity.com

Taking it all back, we're so sorry, here's some more sensible guidelines, so it now mostly targets the bigger money makers using the 2024 version of Unity.

Look, I know companies do the whole 'threaten community with the worst outcome, act like you react to community wishes by presenting new terms that are what you wanted all along' dance routine, but there's levels to even that. You don't start with coming to someone's house and murdering their dog. Sometimes bad executive decisions are just that.

I hate the position they've put small and mid-sized developers in. Now they don't have to worry about their old/current projects (which they never should have had to!), but... they have to decide whether they waste a lot of time switching engines for their next game, or trust this clown show to not do something like this again in the future.

The similarities to the OGL saga are something. I'm sure the details differ in ways I dont really care about, but its quite funny at a superficial level.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Oh, and there's the mandatory 'we are so poor, we can barely keep the lights on, we just tried to keep ourselves funded' sympathy plea thrown in. From a company with 7.7k employees, paying their execs millions and spending 4.4 BILLIONS to acquire a malware ad company.

 

[Ulfgeir]

Anyway, I would highly recommend reading more sources about economics, and relying less on people at Reddit. IMO.

Where would the fun be in that?

/sarcasm..

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Oh, and there's the mandatory 'we are so poor, we can barely keep the lights on, we just tried to keep ourselves funded' sympathy plea thrown in. From a company with 7.7k employees, paying their execs millions and spending 4.4 BILLIONS to acquire a malware ad company.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001810806/3322a6e7-cdea-4aab-ae85-bf9b96c59e9e.pdf

Reasonably heavy quarterly loss. They did generate over $40M cash from operations last quarter. And have a ton of cash ($1.5B) so they have a lot of stock comp or amortizations in their results.

I don’t follow them, would have to see if they paid for the last acquisition with stock or cash.

I can see why they are being pressured to make more as their cash from operations is not amazing for a software company.