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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago

    Hearthstone runs on Unity. I'm ok setting up a little something to let people constantly install and uninstall Hearthstone to bleed Blizzard dry... hell, once it's discovered how your installs are tracked, I could see that leading to insane exploitation.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?

    Wouldn't even need a small game technically. I'm pretty sure the only way to properly calculate would be running a postinstall script and someone could presumably just keep running that script

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Depending on how they generate a hardware fingerprint, fabricating random ones every check is a single LD_PRELOAD (or equivalent) away.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.

    The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn't stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but... like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren't listening to the engineers.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    How many reinstalls? Because I have games I have bought 4 PCs/laptops ago, not counting some few more when I installed them in family members' computers to play with them. What about OS updates? Windows keeps insisting to move to 11.

    Frankly, this doesn't sound reasonable at all. It's not even like Unity is doing any of the hosting to justify squeezing devs like this.

    edit: Now it has been confirmed it's not measured on an unique hardware basis, any reinstall counts. It's just madness.

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