I have absolutely zero details about what went down at the Unity offices today, and I sincerely hope everyone's okay. I think the company is making violent and ruinous decisions but (and I shouldn't have to say this) death threats are bad and aren't going to get the company to change its mind.
The news has got me thinkin' about how we got here, though. And I've built this (entirely baseless and fictive but arguably credible) chain of events in my head that hits like every shitty thing happening in the gaming and tech spaces right now. Basically:
- The mid-2020s enshittification* of every tech platform hits Unity, resulting in their terrible new monetization strategy
- This prompts game devs, obviously angered and taken by surprise, to make public statements about how this will harm them - including some that are a little tongue in cheek.
- This gets credulously reported by a failing games journalism industry as actual news, because no one is paid enough to do actual reportage that reaches out to a game developer and anyways that listicle written by an AI and cleaned up by you was due an hour ago, buddy.
- These news stories reach gamer circles where what was sloppy reportage becomes full-on misinformation on web forums and especially on TikTok (check that out - 50k+ likes on a post that lists a nuke next to a bunch of beloved titles). What was "Dev threatens to pull Cult of the Lamb on Jan 1" becomes "Every Unity game will stop existing in three months."
- Some toxic teenage gamer (or perhaps mid-20s irony poisoned chanlord), absolutely convinced that Unity is coming to kill Among Us/Marvel Snap/Genshin Impact/Cult of the Lamb/Pokemon/Rust/whatever calls in a bomb or death threat to the Unity offices. Or maybe they posted a picture of a bunch of guns they may or may not own to Facebook along with some threatening statement. I don't know/care what the details are, the point is I think that's how we get from there to here.
And like... it just feels like a very 2020s set of problems? From failing journalism to social media platforms rife with misinformation to undealt with gamer toxicity that's been festering since 2014 to privately held infrastructure we have relied on for over a decade suddenly deciding they want to be untenable solutions in the name of private equity it's... it's all there.
* Yes, I understand that this isn't really enshittification. It isn't an open platfrom that is now pivoting away from growth to revenue generation and thus making the product itself worse, it's a company that went public and then immediately lost most of its value and the dipshit know-nothing management is leaning into the F2P business because it's lucrative and they don't care about traditional game dev. But given its role as critical infrastructure that is now unusable due to the needs of capital, it feels enshittification adjacent.
