No, it’s not socially acceptable. Yes, I wish it were.

Like, does this mean you are afraid of other people you don’t know judging you, or that you or your friends find it socially unacceptable?

Either way that seems to be more of an individual problem rather than a social one. I am physically affectionate with my friends and have never been confronted about it by a member of the public , not that I would really care if I were. People be dumb, I’m not going to let someone else’s projected homophobia dictate my friendship.

That’s fair, though it doesn’t seem to bother the little critters like rabbits or racoons for some reason. But yeah, it’ll def make the deer scamper off.

As an avid backpacker, I’m not stoked about the plan to reintroduce brown bears to my state.

I do a lot of hiking as well, and yes brown bears are definitely more of a pucker your b-hole scenario. But for the most part as long as you don’t sneak up on one accidentally or accidentally get between the bear and the cubs, they’re fairly harmless. Ya just gotta have something that makes some noise when you’re hiking, I have buddies that just strap a cow bell on their packs.

It would still be pretty rare for one to outright attack a full grown person, they are generally aware that peeps be dangerous.

It’s kinda why I never got the whole would you rather thing. As a fairly big dude, I’d much prefer the bear over a man or a woman. The bear is more than likely just going to scamper off. Even decent people in bad situations are very dangerous creatures, and more than likely, I’m just going to have to take care of a complete stranger in the woods.

Sounds like your typical engineer. I passed fluid dynamics, I deserve to look at the big ball of plasma.

My eyes haven’t hurt this bad since studying for differential equations theory… Have I told you I’m an engineer?

We recently had a person from the hospital cleaning services throw away a 240k prosthetic limb. I felt really bad for the dude, because the prosthetist who was working with it is always super messy, and we do throw away a lot of weird looking stuff. The guy even tried going out to the dumpster and dug around for it.

We convinced the hospital not to fire the guy despite having to file a police report for insurance purposes. Unfortunately, he ended up being let go a couple months later for “unrelated” circumstances.

And art should be accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy. There’s a reason that piracy almost died out completely and then came back with a vengeance. People don’t mind paying a reasonable price for art, the prices and accessibility of art has just become unfeasible.

The distribution is a distribution of game licenses with associated terms, and those terms don’t dictate a limit to the consumer on the number of installations on hardware they own for private/non-commercial purposes.

Right, but it’s not unity who is selling the game license. Nor are they limiting the end consumers ability to download the game as many times as they wish. They are just charging the dev for the use of server space and traffic.

argument against the terms of the licenses, not the terms of their arrangements with devs.

The arrangement with the devs is literally the only thing they have control over… it’s a service based company. Services are allowed to change their terms whenever they want, you don’t own access to their services, you pay to access them. If they change their terms of services and you don’t agree, you stop paying for the continuation of service.

TOS agreements are for the benefit of the company, not the benefit of the consumer. You can sue or arbitrate over the TOS, but it’s primarily only successful in cases involving negligence that harms the client e.g a leak of sensitive data that makes someone loose an important client.

Lost revenue obviously isn’t the reason for it, anyway. It’s almost certainly due to technical limitations of their data collection method resulting in them not being able to associate unique installations with their associated license. So the reason devs must accept a degree of inaccuracy that inherently favours Unity is that it would be illegal for Unity to be accurate.

I think that’s quite an assumption… servers cost money, sending a large amount of traffic through them cost money, it’s pretty standard for service companies to increase fees with increased server usage.

If I were a guessing guy, I would imagine that being able to track unique downloads would be kinda important for a gaming dev service.

It’s not really an intricacy of IP law though,

It is in the fact that the game was built on their platform using their IP. They may own the game they created, but they don’t own the right to distribution, that’s a service.

legally charge the dev, an invoice has to be raised. That’s a legal document, there’s an item on it, a quantity, and a price.

That’s if you are doing product business, the service industry has more flexibility in their terms of service and how much they can charge for it. The option is typically to discontinue the service or to pay for continued service.

The way it’s different to reddit is that Unity wants to charge per installation on unique hardware. That is, if you buy a license for the game, and install it on your PC as well as your Steam deck, then the devs need to pay 2x install fees.

Right, and as a service they will claim that additional downloads are an responsible for the loss of additional revenue, one they wish to offset to the customer who created it.

I’m not saying that this is a good thing, just explaining that the service industry has a lot leverage in court.

Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally

Ehhh, it very well might not be. But service providers have an awful lot of control of their platforms and who and how they allow access to it, and for how much. A lot of the interpretations in IP courts when it comes to the digital service seem to be about 5 years behind the actual industry. Add on the fact that a lot of the people running the IP courts barely know how to operate a computer, let alone the ins and outs of digital media and we usually get an environment that’s skewed towards the industry.

A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge.

I think it would be interpreted pretty close to what reddit did with their API access. Technically it’s just a different type of service fee, and it’s backed by a pretty simple logic of offsetting the cost of the involved traffic.

I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock.

The main sticking point would be that you would have to prove that there is a logical path to long-term profitability that surpasses or offsets the resulting devaluation of pursuing a completely different profit model.

I think it really depends on how big the devaluation will be at the end of everything, and if they loose large clients specify their reasons for leaving.

It’s all pretty complicated, but Im still guessing theyre having solvency issues, just by looking at their IPO price since the last quarter of 2021 they’ve lost about 50% of their value without any real signs of recovery.

Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though?

Likely they’ve been remaining solvent through private equity, which has probably dried up. Their fees were probably just enough to entice further investment, but most of these companies operate on paying loans with new loans until they can become profitable in the long term.

Usually when a price hike that doesn’t make sense happens, it’s because they’ve failed to get a new injection of capital to remain in solvency. So they have to speed up the fee schedule to make their payments to the investors.

Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.

It’s a public IPO, they don’t have to be profitable, they just have to appear as if they will be profitable to increase share price. This kind of hike is not something that a public IPO would do as it will assuredly drop stock price, which is illegal unless there is no alternative.

I’m guessing it’s their last ditch effort to remain in good solvency. A board member making trades before a big change is almost always a sign of the rats abandoning the ship.

A lot of the wealth created by venture capital and the service economy were only ever possible with the help of what is essentially free money. With the increase in interest rates and the collapse of a major venture capital bank, those corporations dependent on low interest payments are going to collapse as well.

As interest rates climb and venture capital dries up, the companies who were just scraping by, or dependent on debt loading during development have had their runway cut short.

We are getting to the point where companies aren’t going to be utilize fronting a huge amount of debt as a strategy for long term growth.

Unity looks to be one of the companies who wanted to utilize the slow boil tactic perfected by the likes of Google or Amazon. Where they front the cost of tons of free and convenient services, hoping that companies become dependent on them, slowly creating fees over time until they become profitable.

If I were a guessing guy, they’ve hit the end of their run way, and have failed to secure a new injection of capital sufficient enough to make the payments on their loans. Likely their options have come to find a way to make your payments, or you’ll be giving your entire operation to a bank.

This will be the next big class action suit similar to tobacco. Big sugar has been operating just like tobacco, denying negative side effects and lobbying at state and federal levels to stifle bans and regulatory actions.

America is on the verge of a sytemeic failure when it comes to health care, and a lot of that is due to the prevalence of diabetes in our aging population.

Right now one in every three medicare dollars goes towards treating diabetes, a perfectly preventable disease. It’s not sustainable, and it’s literally siphoning off our ability to treat other ailments.