• Envis10n@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    So he sells a bunch of shares right before the announcement that is likely going to tank their stock price

    • meco03211@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Pretty sure CEOs need to jump through more hoops to sell their shares like reporting that they plan to sell.

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And if they don’t, sometimes they get a slap on the wrist, assuming the money is still within the country. Which it ain’t.

      • FredericChopin_@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Yeah. I’m not one to defend CEOs but don’t they usually have these orders in place years in advance?

        Edit: Ask a question. Get a downvote but no correction. Why?

      • Envis10n@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You think they just suddenly came up with this model? No shit they have to jump through hoops. That doesn’t stop them from doing it in advance of something like this

    • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A “bunch” being 2000 when he still owns like 3000x that. This was a quarterly tax sell off that an unethical reporter is using to get clicks.

      Hes a dick but this stock selling isn’t nefarious.

    • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Not that scumbag ceos wouldn’t do such a thing, but doesn’t appear to be the case here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/ Anyways, investors love this subscription model recurring revenue junk, makes sense that if anything their stock price has risen from this announcement. We’ll see how it pans out in the long term though.

      • Brokkr@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Price is tanking at the opening bell while the market overall is flat or positive.

        • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          It’s hard to say sometimes, announcement was yesterday morning and it didn’t budge it much (when I originally made comment stocks had not yet opened for today). It could also be related to the consumer price index showing an inflation uptick this morning compared to July, raising concerns for more rate increases. That report was just released this morning so seems a more likely cause for a change today.That tends to hit faster growing tech companies with poor p/e ratios like unity. There are other companies with the same pattern today, and the drop around the same time. Maybe you could argue the backlash wasn’t felt until overnight or something? But it’s the stock market, no one can really say for sure.

          Not that insider trading and things aren’t huge problems, but a ceo who’s paid in stock and has regular planned in advance sales of that stock doesn’t seem quite the conspiracy to me in this specific case. This was another single 2,000 sale, small in comparison to the 50,000 shares sold so far this year alone for this guy. Ceos often have pay and bonuses tied directly to share price, so the idea they would force a policy they thought would lose money in a conspiracy to tank the share price all to sell another 4% of the total amount of stock he’s sold this year at a 5% profit when he could just, not do that, and sell the stock anyways, seems like a huge stretch for me.

          Like I don’t understand what the conspiracy is supposed to be, ceo decides to tank company shares on purpose for no reason and then sells stock in advance? Why didn’t ceo just decide not to tank company shares and continue to make lots more money instead? Presumably they thought this would increase their revenue and profits and therefore stock prices and were hoping it would be popular with investors. Like if he thought it would tank stock prices, the way to make more money would be just not to do it. Now if it’s something like, unity ceo had advance knowledge of an earnings report miss and sold a bunch of shares under the table before the report was public, now that’s insider trading and a big problem. Or unity ceo shorted hundreds of thousands of company shares and then tanked company on purpose. Anyways, this whole story just seems like uninformed click bait. Save the outrage for unity’s decision to hurt game developers.

      • Envis10n@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Depending on how long the backlash can stick around, I would expect to see it go down with a large exodus. In particular, if Microsoft gets upset about the impact it could have to gamepass. Unity does seem to be backtracking, but it really feels like they overextended on purpose to make the actual result feel less shitty

    • VeracityMD@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      If you RTFA he’s been selling shares steadily over the last year. This is not exactly a sudden dump.

      • Envis10n@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I did read it. Doesn’t mean he didn’t know that there would be backlash

    • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      He should go work for Epic, they’re really just begging to be run into the ground by a shitty CEO

        • GreenMario@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Sweeney wrote ZZT. His only “crime” was pissing off the Gabe fanboys.

          • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Nah, his crime was paying studios for timed exclusives.

            It’s one thing to provide a viable alternative to Steam and give consumers more options. It’s another to provide an inferior alternative to Steam, pay money to take away consumers’ options, and act like the messiah of the gaming industry while doing so.

            • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              But developers like it, because it’s a sum of cash they get as guaranteed money, and epic gets exclusives as a result.

              …and in the end, it’s just a launcher. At least you don’t have to buy a whole other dang console.

              • operetingushisutemu@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                Epic was always behind Steam, if you like it or not. That Valve tries to assure its independency from other vendors (Microsoft) by creating its own OS and hardware should not be too difficult to understand as a company decision. At the meantime Epic is trying to buy its place in the market with exclusives and free games, not respecting or trying to bend other platforms rules.

                I don’t care where you buy your games, but I do care, which companies try to force me to their buggy, unfinished and user-unfriendly platform, for a game I was waiting to be published.

                But it’s a preference thing.

              • no surprises@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                …and in the end, it’s just a launcher.

                It’s a digital store, meaning that you’re paying them money to have a record in their database that you “own” a game. This locks you to the service much more than a launcher would lock you. Lutris is just a launcher, not Epic Store.

              • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It’s a similar UX issue to TV/movie streaming.

                Sure, it’s just another one. But, it’s a bad experience for the end user. You have some games exclusive to one launcher, other games exclusive to some other launcher, and so on. You have multiple different flows to achieve the same thing, and each of them are subtly different. Paradoxically, the only consistent way to launch all my games is by avoiding the launchers entirely and instead using the desktop shortcuts they create for games.

              • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                I will say that next time to a console.

                Not a literal comparison but you see where I am coming from.
                Make epic GS a better version of steam (technical viewpoint not community) and I could see myself building another library.

  • TsarVul@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Like laying down a mighty fart just as the elevator doors close, Unity management abandon the aircraft they were supposed to captain on their golden parachutes. The corporate money making machine continues to chug on.

  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As they say, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. This guy is a fucking idiot, even by corporate douchebag standards

    • BURN@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure every moderately in touch indie developer has removed Unity from their future projects. They’ve entirely lost the trust of the community and probably can’t do anything to earn it back

    • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I too think he is an idiot, but since he likely is not, we have to wonder why he is tanking Unity. Mayne he and Musk are both playing some game where they personally win by destroying a company? I don’t know, but it all seems suspicious.

  • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    He sold 2,000 fucking options at $1.43 a piece today. The largest trade he’s ever made was selling 1,899,317 units of Unity Software stock on 4 June 2020 worth over $87,615,493. On average, Mr trades about 193,001 units every 155 days since 2012.

    Stop clicking on yahoo finance shit articles. List of his unity sales history: https://wallmine.com/people/85761/john-s-riccitiello

    • solstice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Adding to this: SEC regs for officers in public companies require them to plan and disclose trades well in advance. It’s not exactly my field and I’m way too lazy to research, but it’s probably like one or two quarters in advance. This is to prevent market panic and speculation exactly like the bs in this thread.

      • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yep, I didn’t bother to include the advance disclosure requirements. Publically traded company employees with insider information are banned from trading on it (theoretically could be anyone but generally just reserved for execs who actually make enough off the dishonesty to be worth going after). Execs can’t even trade in real time as the temptation is obviously too great, they have to make any buy/sell purchases of their own company a quarter in advance.

  • northendtrooper@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I remember rooting for Unity over Unreal because I like using C# over C++ (because smooth brain). But when he stated that if dev aren’t using mobile then they are dumb (paraphrasing), I shifted to Unreal. Glad I did after seeing this shit show. Hope he gets the boot after this.

    • Dawn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I liked using unity cause it was faster, more light weight, and had much more community based things around it. I’ve been mainly developing in unreal this past year due to it being a group thing, but I’m gonna be fully switching over to Godot for any personal or individual development now.

    • morriscox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I looked at C++ code and C# code and decided to go for C# because it’s actually readable for someone starting.

    • learningduck@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Not defending the CEO, but selling 2k shares mean nothing for a CEO. I believe this would be a small percentage of his bonus.

      • mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        According to the article, he has sold over 50000 within the last year alone, and hasn’t buy back a single one. And that’s already saying something.

      • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Still immoral. I know everyone here is arguing about SEC regulations and that fuckboy was technically within his legal rights, but I’d like to remind you all that THE LAW IS ONLY THE BARE MINIMUM FOR ACCEPTABLE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND YOU SHOULD PROBABLY AIM WELL ABOVE IT TO NOT BE A COMPLETE SHITBAG

        I don’t care about what’s legal, this was still an immoral move.

        • learningduck@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Don’t know man, 2k of unity shares should be miniscule compared to salary of a CEO of a company this size. It could be just selling to pay for tax or something. 2k of Unity worth less than $80k.

  • sadbehr@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

    Nothing suspicious about that.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is the new Reddit, things like reasoning don’t go with the group think, we don’t do that here.

        /s obviously, since this was downvoted thought I’d be sassy about the general decline in lemmy quality.

        • solstice@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Besides slashdot back in the day I’m not sure if there’s a single place on the internet where people stop to think. And slashdot was heavily biased too come to think of it.

  • canni@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I mean that’s only like $70,000, which I’m guessing for him isn’t a huge amount of money.