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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Charging for any install is just so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.

Actually they clarified - you're wrong, they are charging for any install. Go read the thread on their official forums. It is in fact so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.

They clarified - you're wrong, they are only charging for the first install.

They've made multiple conflicting statements in different places! When I made my post I'd seen official communications from Unity workers on their forums stating that separate installs would be counted.

That's a policy change, not a clarification. At launch (and as recently as yesterday), they fully intended for each installation to be charged and made clear statements to that effect. Afterwards (2023-09-13), they changed their mind and will implement a slightly different policy.

Do you have a source for this?

It's in the article you linked (among other places):

After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)

They said one thing, then they had a meeting, then they said a second thing which is incompatible with the first. You don't "clarify" a statement when you completely negate what you said.

And how exactly do they think they're going to limit paying customers ability to install and reinstall their games? Always online DRM? Force the game dev to include some library so installs can be tracked? And they are going to filter that REST endpoint by unique customer ID? They are somehow going to keep that rest point from being slammed with fake traffic or being trolled by DDOS?

Is their installer going to fail secure and deny you the ability to install the game unless it can call the mothership? This is a complete shitshow even theoretically.

Force the game dev to include some library so installs can be tracked?

The engine already has analytics built in that do most of what's needed to track this.

Sure, but what's the engine gonna do when it fails to contact the analytics servers? (Maybe its launched in a firewalled container or some other DNS shenanigans.). Refuse to run? Nag the players? What a dumpsterfire

I think you might have misunderstood. The one that has to pay is the developer.

End users aren't being charged, so there's no reason for them to mess with firewalls or DNS settings. Maybe a tiny handful might try to support the devs by blocking Unity's tracking beacon, but 99%+ will just hit the Install button as usual.

"You pay us when your product gets pirated", basically. No wonder it's such a popular idea.

If a developer modifies the engine to remove the analytics then they'll be looking at a fat lawsuit from Unity. If endusers or piracy cracking scenes or whatever do it then I don't think Unity will care since most users aren't going to bother.

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