They removed charging again for deleting and reinstalling but are still charging for installing on a different device. So they just realized that there's no way to enforce the former without people abusing it
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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They could still abuse the latter if they use a VM to tweak the device fingerprint, and you know that'll happen.
The other thing that was brought up, and is a good point, is that this will cause publishers to yank their games from anything like GamePass as the cost will be an unknown liability to them.
It'll probably much easier... In the end, Unity needs to call something to let them know there was an install, like http://telemetry.unity.com?game=DiabloImmortal&deviceId=acb-123
After installing a game locally or on a VM / Sandboxie, someone will figure out how it works... Then you just generate a lot of calls, either call it locally or through a proxylist / botnet - and you have millions of installs.
That brings up a good point. If they were smart they'd encrypt the fingerprint payload so it can't be easily spoofed. However, I thought I read that this was going to apply to already existing games. So short of the developers (laughably) issuing an update for existing games, how are they going track installs of older games? And that's probably easier to target for the lulz.
Unity aren't exactly in the DRM business, and there is really no chance they're going to do something silly like licensing Denuvo for every single one of their clients just to obfuscate a piece of analytics code designed to make them money; stuff's far more expensive than what they'd earn from it. They're not going to build something remotely Denuvo-like, the best you can hope for is obfuscation that only has to be cracked once that gets cracked in days.
My guess is they're not even going to bother doing HWID-ish nonsense and will just hope that identifiers from the previous install hang around, which will often be the case on Windows PC anyhow (a little more complicated on other OSes). Hitting the uninstall and reinstall buttons in Steam doesn't do much other than deleting the game's files and re-running redistributable installers the first time you play the game.
But on Android/iOS where this is really targeted at, that approach simply doesn't work. The only stable thing apps can get across a reinstall is the AAID/IDFA advertising identifiers and that can be turned off or changed at will. Either Unity has found a novel solution (which is a one way trip to Apple's shitlist) or they're just bullshitting this change to appease the population while not actually changing anything. Since they did their prep work so badly that they couldn't even answer whether app updates would count, my money's on the latter.
Last year Unity merged with ironSource - a "mobile monetization and distribution" company that was once blacklisted by Microsoft for developing and distributing actual malware. I'd assume the tracking is done via a product brought over from that side of the business.
If they do roll it out, there will be a vested interest in actually abusing it purely to highlight the absurdity. The legal fees alone from a company fighting the charges would negate a vast amount of any potential profit.
Which means they'll probably drop 'excessive' install charges from anyone they think can actually take them to court and will instead focus on gouging smaller companies that can't fight back.
well sure, they would probably encrypt the payload, but they'd still have to add the encryption code / key in there to be able to do that.
It wouldn't be as easy as just finding the correct url and calling it loads of times, but someone cracking the game would already be deobfuscating and reverse engineering the code anyways patch out the DRM.
So figuring out how Unity "calls home" and replicating it can't be too complicated
Heck, I was thinking the same but "what do I need to block to ensure unity never sees my installs?"
It's going to be to Unity's benefit to make tracking installs a token gesture and overcharge developers, with prohibitively expensive legal action required to claw any overcharges back. So guess what's going to happen ?
Threaten? I'm gone. Unity fit my workflow a lot better than Unreal, and I've never tried Godot because it previously wasn't ready for 3d. But Unity has made too many scary moves in the last few years, and I can't take that much risk.
I've never published a game with it, but I did a few game jams a while back, and I'm pretty confident that I could have. But now I'll be trying something else. I'm looking at Godot first, because UE made my head spin. I could handle Blueprints easily, but trying to make sense of their C++ stuff was very frustrating.
While not as intuitive, you could probably try to use one of the Quake 2 or 3 sourceports if you want to make a 3D game and Godot's performance isn't up to speed, or even OpenMW! Wicked might also be worth checking out
Ah, the classic "Beat a ho, then run her a bath" technique. You do something absolutely heinous, then you either walk part of it back or give some minor carrot that doesn't matter to make people feel better. People feel like they forced change or got a deal, so they accept the horrible thing you did.
There's free software equivalents to Unity? Video games are made by programmers, a FOSS alternative would advance quickly give thay its users are all programmers themselves, no?
https://godotengine.org/ released under the MIT license and very similar to Unity in terms of their target users.
Godot and Bevy are both FOSS. Godot is built in C++ and allows using GdScript and C++, or C#. Bevy is built in Rust and allows using Rust
For rust, you can still use godot. There is the godot-rust is complete for godot 3, on development for godot 4.
I've finally realized why is all of this happening, and it makes so much sense!
For the last few years, Unity is led by a former Electronic Arts CEO...
Hey I made the guitar you used in that song please give me royalties....
Anyone was able to find they telemtry url? We can test that unity was donwloaded 1B times per minute? Just give a message.