Video-Game Company Unity Closes Offices Following Death Threat
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> "My word choice was crude. I am sorry. I am listening and I will do better," he later said.
I see he's taking his own advice, and doing better!
Seems like many many american ceo's are hiring bodyguards for themselves... At least nobility had the concept of noblesse oblige.
Millionaire CEO Tim Gurner wants unemployment to jump to 50% because workers have become ‘arrogant’ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tim-gurner...
When villains unmask, believe them.
[1] https://thehustle.co/avocado-guy-goes-viral-again-and-other-....
It's incredible how people think this is "a rich guy revealing their true colors" as if they don't know what they are doing, which is manipulating you into linking more to him.
PR teams peddle memes that play up character; “that persons a maverick and rebel” or “taken out of context” without ever providing the context, or retconning the clearly defined context the original comment was in response to.
It’s a form of obscurantism; use money to flood airwaves with spin, exhaust people with it so they move on; it’s intentional manipulation of innate biological systems; we get tired of the same old forms of information: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen...
That’s not just a teen biology thing, it’s just adults get conditioned to grit and bear their daily grind or reality will implode. Anecdotally I know more people tired of their repetitive office job than in love with it.
We’re stateful beings and while media does not have perfect mind control of an individual, media is good at manipulating state of the aggregate such we just start telling each other shut up when we’ve had our fill.
He’s either a blowhard or an idiot. Or maybe both, I guess.
Populism (Trumpism) will NEVER go away as long as we have an executive class without a ounce of empathy.
This is normal. Many CEOs are paid primarily in stock. No matter how much you believe in your company, diversification is financially wise, so of course they are always selling stock. Typically they sell every month on a schedule pre-determined months or years in advance. No CEO is ever going to buy their own stock because it would make no financial sense.
Reporters looking for clicks love this situation because it means that whenever a company does something that makes people angry, you can always look up the CEO's stock sales and discover that, oh wow, they just sold a bunch of stock in the last month! And they never buy any! The reporter conveniently omits the fact that the CEO has been selling that exact same quantity of stock every single month going back years.
Sometimes the reporter gets extra-lucky and the CEO's stock is primarily in class B shares, which must first be converted to class A before sale. So every month, the CEO converts some number of shares to class A, and then immediately sells them. This shows up in financial records as the CEO sold 100% of their class A shares. So the reporter reports: "The CEO just sold ALL their stock last week!"
CEOs and other top execs are _not allowed_ to just sell stock on a whim, they have to set up a schedule far in advance. The SEC is quite serious about this.
(Now, if you do find that a CEO has sold an _unusually large_ amount of stock compared to their historical schedule, then maybe you have something, but somehow that's never what the reporters are saying...)
(BTW 2000 shares of Unity is like ~$80,000. 50,000 shares is ~$2M. The guy apparently receives over $10M of stock per year so these numbers are surprisingly small, he seems to be holding onto most of it: https://www1.salary.com/John-Riccitiello-Salary-Bonus-Stock-... )
Insider trading is a crime that is definitely enforced and comes with serious consequences. The SEC regularly publishes a list of people who have been convicted and it made a record number of convictions last year (nothing surprising since the population keeps growing). Martha Stewart was not exceptional. She was convicted because she committed crimes.
I don't appreciate the linking you've done there. I do not condone or participate in insider trading nor do I personally know anyone who does. I actually want it regulated and prosecuted much more strictly.
> The SEC regularly publishes a list of people who have been convicted and it made a record number of convictions last year
How many of those are CEOs, executives, or board members at large corporations or politicans? The point being that powerful and wealthy people can often get away with it. See Musk's market manipulation.
The entire point of my comment and the one I replied to was to point put the several loopholes that very probably allow rampant insider trading.
I would even go so far as to question whether CEOs, executives, and board members should even be allowed to own stock in their company and related industries given the level of conflict of interest. Certified accountants can't even hold the broadest of broad market ETFs in an IRA if the ETF is even tacitly related to a client. In other words, any trading done by top-level management at major corporations is likely technically insider trading.
Plausible deniability.
Can the FTC show company leadership knew the announcement would be a "stock tanking" one? After all, why would they intentionally do that? Price increases are positive announcements for many companies.
Certainly the life expectancy of millionaire CEO’s seems to be a lot higher.
Rich folks might be able to exert a bit more control, but I don't believe for a second that lessens fear. I'd actually suspect the opposite.
In any case, I think its ridiculous.
That would apply to a non-insignificant % of the population of HN. There are tons of authors, programmers and founders with that much money. You really think that if someone writes a book that goes on to sell enough that they make more than $9,999,999 they should fear for their safety if they dare reap the real value of their work?
All public claims of death threats when somebody is going through a bad PR cycle should be considered somewhat suspect unless some kind of police report or credible evidence is provided.
No. Don't send death threats!
This shouldn't need to be predicated by anything. If Unity made this whole story up, still don't.
> I hate Unity as next guy, but please don't do this. Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.
Do we care if a death threat was actually sent in this context? Would it change anything about this statement?
Did they mean to reply to someone else?
Yes it would change immensely. How would HN feel if I falsely claimed I was getting death threats from members so I could get attention.
> Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.
Wouldn't you?
PRO TIP: You can't.
And as if his message is going to change his mind! Thus my question.
This sort of crap becoming widespread will eventually result in the death of privacy for everyone.
Take an actual company making a visibly greedy decision and I would not be surprised.
When a company makes a choice (actively or passively) that priorities perception, usually it is largely a function of the leadership's humanity, and not a shrewd decision based on some objective projection of long-term consequences.
I ofc wouldn't be advocating to _not_ take them seriously but I don't understand if people are just getting crazier or people are taking them more seriously? Ironically, I feel like there used to be more back in the day but nobody treated them seriously.
If they're credible, by all means safety is at stake and close up shop.
I don't doubt the number of crazy people with the means and motivation to send a death threat is greater than 0. I just wonder how credible on the credible scale this is.
I think they were probably taken as seriously before, it's just that the ease of making threats (empty or not) is different now.
They might even be taken less seriously. As more correct approach is only to contact authorities and let them verify them or take needed action.
I don't at all doubt there are people that stupid/crazy. Jw if there are more credible crazies these days or have we changed how we react to them.
People don't take them seriously, they're used in cases like this to try to look like an innocent victim of radicals. Given a large enough company it is /always/ going to be possible to find a "death threat".
Just vote with your wallet and switch engines, optionally (ideally) donate to open source projects like Godot.
Show me an instance of SWATTING that didn't involve "gamers", I'd love to be proven wrong here.
With things like Gamepass, players have access to much more content for a lot less money. There's no way that this isn't having a massive impact on sales and revenue downstream for studios and other gaming vendors. If the revenue changes in indie gaming are anything like the shift from traditional album sales to iTunes and then Spotify, then things are going to get ugly.
Tech has identified that the most valuable position to hold is owning the market and we've seen it over and over again, and it never works out in favor of the suppliers or consumers in the long run.
Gamepass is literally renting games on a flat monthly fee (which they've recently increased, btw). Unity chose a really stupid approach to handle their new pricing, but they're doing what everyone is doing, hiking prices in an uncertain market. I suspect this is at least partially because of services like Gamepass, but I'd love to know more.
Unity is trying to redefine their existing product as a service. This isn't exactly 'just' a price hike and I think its why people are so upset about it.
And I agree with your suspicion. It seems that finding a way to offer a service instead of a product is a license to print money, so I imagine many companies have people pushing for this regardless of how well it would be received or how much sense it makes.
Unity has ~7,000 employees, and is losing money. They need to a way to monetize, and they are clumsily trying to target their most successful users to pay more. Price increase aren't rent seeking.
If Unity had said that the new policy would only apply to games released (as opposed to installed) after 2024, and also say that existing developer subscription pricing would be honored for some number of years, it would at least seem more fair. They will still lose developers, but maybe they will be less susceptible to lawsuits and death threats.