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Notes -
Fresh controversial gaming news.
If you're not familiar with Unity, it's one of the more popular game engines in use today, especially for Indy developers. It's frequently recommended for it's relative ease of use, and up until now, generous licensing. Even if you're a very casual gamer, you've probably played some games built on this platform like Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, or Monument Valley.
Today, Unity has announced some significant pricing changes. Most controversial seems to be that beyond a certain revenue and install threshold, developers will be paying Unity per install of their game. As in, if you uninstall and reinstall the game, the dev gets charged twice.
This has managed to piss off the usual suspects of game developers, games journalists, and gamers. Many an angry comment written by Dorito stained keyboards are flooding messageboards and twitter about how this is the death of gaming. (Tongue-in-cheek by the way, as a non-game developer I find the pricing model half-baked.)
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
Most people are up in arms about the fact that this charges for any install, not just unique installs. But this seems like a giant nothingburger because nothing in the blogpost specifically says it's not unique installs. Doing (or switching to) a fee per unique install basically solves all the issues people have while still accomplishing Unity's goal of charging per install. 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.
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.
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.
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