Time and potentially some filing/service costs. You may be able to claim some of those as well (When I almost had to sue for a security deposit, in that Jurisdiction I could get some filing fees but not service costs for whatever reason...)
That said, if they don't show up, you'll get a default judgement. And if TM doesn't pay, they can have fun with it if there is an office nearby. A while back someone got a judgement against a bank, they didn't pay out. He came by with the sheriff and they started loading up chairs/etc when they hesitated to cut a check. :)
Or, whatever other 'collection' action you may have to motion for after the fact if they don't pay.
At least where I live (Texas, United States) from what I saw it's allowed to have legal counsel, although it may be uncommon. I'll have to look into the process more and see if there's anything I can pursue.
I vaguely recall in california you can opt-out of arbitration within 30 days of a contract. don't know if there are details or if that is still the case.
> Legal counsel isn't allowed in small claims courts.
That's only true in a handful of states. Most allow you to bring a lawyer.
Small claims courts will generally have simpler and friendlier procedures so that even if a lawyer is allowed you will be fine without one in most cases.
I’d say brain drain is the root problem. It’s hard to build a competitive ecosystem when the most ambitious and skilled people move away. From Europe, they move to the US. From within the US, they move to one of a few cities, most notably San Francisco.
There is a brain drain because there are little to no opportunities if you are skilled and less skilled people keep trying to push you down the ladder. If you stop people from moving, they will grow discontent and will probably not be working in tech anyway and prefer a more sane environment. I don't think most U.S. people realize how bad, inefficient and crooked the tech scene can be in some countries.
In my experience as a founder, excitement to work in a particular area is way more important than experience/skills. Ideally you have both. But lack of enthusiasm for a product, especially a niche product, kills a culture.
Yes startups are all about building great products that users will love. But that love should be organic and authentic, not blind belief.
I suspect that this expectation is likely because most startups are actually bullshit products. Look at all the dumbass crypto startups and now the AI startups. Its become an institution that churns out crap so you need to be able to delude yourself into believing the nonsense to keep doing it repeatedly.
I’m pretty sure the opioid epidemic is the leading cause of death in the US. Enormous numbers of Americans are dying from fentanyl and other poisons, but the media doesn’t like to cover it and the Government doesn’t like to talk about it.
I have no sense of its general coverage in the zeitgeist, but this month the White House announced Overdose Awareness Week "to focus the nation’s attention on the devastation caused by illicit fentanyl and other drugs" and also announced funding for a variety of things to attempt addressing it. Their recap links to media coverage in a variety of sources.
Of course, people and front pages quickly tire of 'boring' things like that and unfortunately get more excited about other events prone to popping up in a large country.
Among young people it is currently guns, until recently was cars, and drugs is about half of either, but rising. Drugs has recently risen to be about the same as cancer.
"Poisoning was the leading cause of preventable death for all ages, combined, for the ninth consecutive year and was the leading cause of preventable death for every age from 22 to 68. This is largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States."
The leading cause of death among young people is not guns. It's not even firearm-related injury, which is what your link talks about. The thing at the link (it's not a study) you point to has gotten a lot of press. It is deliberately deceptive.
It uses an age range of 1-19, excluding children 0-1 years old and including adults who are in their 18th and 19th years. So sure, when you do this bullshit maybe you can produce the answer your audience wants to see / which will play well in the press / which will lead to clicks. But it's not honest. The honest statistic for the U.S. is 0-18(exclusive) years old, and when you do the honest thing you see that death by firearm-related injury is not the leading cause of death for minors in the U.S.
The deliberately deceptive statistic is driven by including as many 15-35 year old males as possible. This is the age range when males in gangs are extra killy.
I'm unhappy with a doctor playing games with statistics by manipulating the data, under the guise of actual science, in order to advance a political agenda.
Everyone should be unhappy with that.
But interesting you didn't comment on the other statements in my reply.
The US has significantly higher rate of car fatalities than peer nations, which you're correct in this case shadows its (far more significantly higher than peer nations) rate of gun deaths.
Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).
> Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to basically find additional 50 or so cents per install (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under 10 cents).
In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on Personal/Plus).
For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).
That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee will be calculated and which are above the corresponding thresholds.
For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the platform costs are then:
1'400'000 * 0.20 = 280'000 USD
For the Pro tier, with the volume discounts, the platform costs are then:
If we assume that a publisher might take around 50% (just an example value in the spreadsheet I used; though in practice can be as low as 20%), then that figure becomes:
On top of that, there are also the platform fees (like Steam might take 30% of your revenue straight off the bat, other platforms might take less), so the figure then becomes:
Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD
Personal after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 = 0.35 USD
Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 - (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD
Pro full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD
Pro after 30% platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 = 0.0595 USD
Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 - (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close enough to 0.03 USD)
While the exact percentages might change, Unity asking for say 0.20 USD per copy (or effectively 0.175 USD in the example, because the first 200'000 don't have the runtime fee) means that you'll need to make more gross revenue per copy than that, because your publisher and the platform will both take some of that for themselves.
> As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
I think you've got this wrong. Unity is (multiple really, but for the purposes of this) two products - the engine and unity ads. Unity ads is the money maker, this is an attempt at bridging that gap. Ultimately unity don't care how they pay you, they just want to know that if you're building a successful game off their products, they're going to get paid. They can't do a revshare (because for some insane reason they talked themselves out of that a few years back), so they're left with something that quacks like a revshare, but won't negatively impact their most profitable customers and force them to reconsider.
Ultimately, I think that's as far as they got with the analysis and failed to consider well... everything else.
> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Any game whose monetization strategy is "ads" is uniformly trash-quality shovelware. They're not here for the long haul, they're here to optimize short-term profit and dump as much garbage on the app store as they can.
> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no business sense.
IANAL. In US contract law, a contract that includes a clause allowing one party to unilaterally change the terms at any time may still be enforceable, but there are limitations. Such clauses are often subject to scrutiny and may be challenged if they are deemed unfair, unconscionable, or against public policy. Courts may consider factors like the balance of power between the parties, the clarity of the clause, and whether there was mutual assent to the changes.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Unity's usual contracts, but this is the kind of thing that a court might not take Unity's side on.
Probably very little. Are you implying that they were right to have signed agreements with Unity which effectively gives them controlling rights to the developers’ companies?
The Unity CEO and management team seem actively hostile to game developers. They view them more as adversaries than allies. Their first principle may be something like "How can we extract more revenue from our developers?" rather than "How can we make developers more successful on our platform [such that we all enjoy more success]?". I think that cultural value is the root of a lot of these tactical problems and missteps.
A couple of years ago the CEO called game developers "big fucking idiots" effectively for not extracting the most possible revenue out of the industry. There was the classic "well I actually meant [more innocuous but still dirtbag thing]" walkbacks, but we all knew what he meant.
It now makes a lot more sense when you view it from the perspective of Unity wanting to rip much more revenue out of devs and games using their engine.
He was saying not thinking about monetization during the creative process is idiotic in context of developers wanting to to do monetization.
As in don't tack on monetization at the end of spending years building out your big creative dream. Which is bluntly true, you're going to be in a world for pain.
Most of the talent from IronSource has left or checked out, and they started to slip in competitiveness and lose clients as a result. This pricing model seems designed to slow those losses, but if it increases developer adoption of Godot or another rival platform (other than Unreal), it seems like Unity is playing with fire here.
For point #1, it's the exit price that matters. Whether the exit takes the form of an acquisition or an IPO, is incidental. I've done both multiple times. Acquisitions tend to be faster, cleaner, and easier exits. IPOs are tough, and once public, you're often locked up.
>The E(V) at larger companies is awesome by comparison.
It's not just comp that's variable, but experience too. Fast-growing startups offer career opportunities that you'd rarely see at FANG. Even if your goal is to simply minimize risk and maximize upside, the optimal path is probably something like bouncing back and forth between FANG for the cash comp and fast-growing startups for the career acceleration.
Not to mention the type of people who thrive at early stage startups typically can't stand FANG environments, and vice versa.
As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.
haha I have thought about this. I saw office Space right before I got my first coding job. So I expected the lifestyle of the typical engineer to be in line with the 'drive an old car, live in a small apartment' representation in the movie.
Twenty something years later never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd have insane compensation and perks and yet an even shittier desk situation than depicted in that movie lol.
Not necessarily (although, hard to imagine there's even 1 spammer willing to spend $100,000/yr on some enterprisey crap like Salesforce Pardot or Marketo).
But I'd just go with whatever sender isn't the cheapest and has the founders still intimately involved in the product. Stopping spammers is ultimately still a human game. Postmark used to be my go-to, but they sold, and I'd bet my entire salary that within a few years that service will end up like all the others that have been bought-and-sold.
