Oh good, now I can play a game I payed for and see some ads. Maybe they’ll add skins in games where some character will wear a Taco Bell shirt or change health potions to “Vitamin Water” bottles
On the bright side, a lot of the scene might come out of retirement to crack and clean up this shit or we’ll get new adblocking technology/ software. That said, fuck unity.
I don’t want ad blocking in my games, because I should never see ads in something I paid for. I hate that trend in streaming services, I hated it in mobile games, and I absolutely will not tolerate it in desktop/console gaming. I’d rather not play games than see ads there.
I wonder if it will be that integrated. perhaps if you’re a PC player you can solve all these issues for most non multiplayer games by simply cutting the internet out when you’re not using it to download updates from steam.
if it’s just like a taco bell skin dlc, I’m fine with just ignoring it. it’s the same thing as 47 having the clown costume in hitman. it’s an ignorable goof at worst and maybe at best creates an interesting choice for modders.
don’t get me wrong this is fucked, and John riccatello should really be dismissed after the wave of lawsuits overwhelm unity.
The article suggests it's strictly for smartphone apps. Could just be vague wording on the part of the article, but I struggle to understand how this would be as feasible for console or PC releases.
perhaps. I miss the days when you could airplane mode your way out of ads on your phone. the solution of course was to pay for premium games which are way better than a shitty skinnerbox anyway. but most casual gamers don’t want to
We will truly live in a world where 95% of games are based on Unreal Engine, 4% on Godot or GameMaker Studio, and 1% custom engines.
Which is such a shame… When Unreal does something bad, like absolutely messing up shader compilation, pretty much all games start suffering with this for years. And there are some amazing engines out there… Resident Evil’s scales surprisingly well and looks way better than it has any right to.
These stories are so dumb/intentionally misleading/outrage bait.
Executives have predefined stock sale schedules at regular intervals. This allows them to convert their equity to cash and avoid conflicts of interest. That is, it’s hard to gain an advantage over the market when you sell exactly the same amount every month for the next 4 years.
Where was everyone’s outrage the other 99% of times this guy sold exactly the same amount of stock?
Seems like if they wanted to avoid this sort of suspicion, they’d time the announcement for either right before or nowhere near when the scheduled sale would take place.
But then they wouldn’t get to feel like a Bond villain, so…
Yes, hypothetically the CEO could influence the date an announcement is made for their own personal gain, but it’s not worth it and there will be many more sell events in the future.
Long run, trying to scheme an announcement to gain more at 1/100 sales isn’t worth it.
CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, … part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.
This is a drop in his equity bucket and any gains this article implies are due to “insider trading” will disappear in subsequent events.
Could he have timed the announcement around his sales, or would that be something that legal would have to have ensured wasn’t happening?
If this was ongoing and regular for years then yeah it’s nothing. If there are protections in place to ensure announcements aren’t timed around the schedule then that’s even more nothing (as long as it can be proven that procedure was followed).
It still seems like a system that can easily be manipulated, but yeah if it’s legal then it’s legal and there really can’t be any punishment regardless of ethics or optics…
Damn that’s a good question. I honestly don’t have an answer. I’m not high enough level to that type of validation. Basically I have enough knowledge to insider trade but not enough to influence a decision such as changes in pricing or when something will launch.
I have windows in much I can sell and have to schedule my sales in those windows six months in advance.
It’s really stupid since I’m trading small dollar amount. 20k a year give or take but the company I work for takes it seriously.
It’s not against the rules because chodes like these guys get to write the rules. If we judge wether or not something is harmful by if it’s legal or not, our civil rights will continue to erode.
No, this is against the rules. Perhaps the penalties aren't harsh enough, as most financial crimes come with very little actual punishment, but there are penalties.
Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.
Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
They're announced months in advance and can either trigger on a set date, or at a set stock price. It's more complex than that, and can involve taxes and shit, but the sale itself was above board(ish).
They likely delayed the announcement of the fees to ensure a higher stock price for the sale, which starts getting into a gray area.
If it’s scheduled, which I know a lot of execs need to do anyways to trade stock, and it’s not just randomized and he knows when those sales happen, and he knows his decision is going to tank the price, he can manipulate what he announces and when it’s announced.
What’s stopping him from just announcing this, selling the stock in a timer, then waiting just before he’s scheduled to buy stock and announce that he’s changed his mind?
If I’m the guy who bought that stock from him I’d want to sue. He fucked some sucker over
It only looks like insider trading if you forget the definition of insider trading and only read a headline curated to ignore the important details that show small, consistent sales across time regardless of company activities.
Well yeah of course I didn’t read the article. I don’t give much of a fuck about it. I took the headline at face value (“sold stock days before announcement”) and fired off my Lemmy content into the ass crack of this butt land. You’re welcome.
Insider trading is the trading of a public company’s stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time. Also, it was 2000 shares, which is peanuts.
The article is focusing on this guy because people know who he is. Instead, they should be focusing on the board members who sold tens of thousands of shares right before the announcement. From Kotaku:
Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, …sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
Also, I actually didn’t know this until yesterday, but CEOs are also permitted to buy shares of their own company, so long as they clear the purchase with the SEC. But that would indicate they’re optimistic about their company…
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