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This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
They're going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You'll get charged for it as of you didn't already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming "why didn't I think of that?".
I'd pirate the fuck out of everything if that happens.
The second Steam charges me for an install... Back to the high seas.
Not even about the money.
That's part of the problem; they aren't charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you've done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn't even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
Sounds like pirating a copy and then trying some network fuckery... Fun!
But also if they make it bad enough I'll just do something else. I love games but if they wanna fuck that up bad enough then there are always other ways to kill time.
Maybe the gaming industry needs another collapse.
AAA needs a shake up, that's for sure, if it's just going to continue on it's current trajectory of "nothing new but costs more".
Most of the AAA's can't even be bothered to include as much content and as many systems as games from decades ago. You can play PlayStation 1 & 2 games that are just as complex or more complex than games releases recently. It's all the same stuff but with more pixels and larger localization folders.
Why is Skyfield 130 GBs when at it's core it has all the same functions as Oblivion or Fallout? Why does Octopath Traveller have a sliver of the in-game content that games like Star Ocean and Final Fantasy 9 had? Sports games and Shooters were lost causes years ago.
Indie devs have been making games that are far more fun and original than most AAA teams of multiple hundreds have been able to do in awhile.
The big guys need to return to focusing on fun. Some AAA's can still do it. BG3 and Zelda are the current obvious examples. Those games are Fun. That's what games are supposed to be.
Also, battle passes and season passes and everything that horse armor spawned can all go in the trash when there is another video game collapse.
I knew someone was going to Actually those examples.
This is already how it works with poorly cracked games/software. The games' crack.nfo (readme) will say something like: - Copy the .exe to the /bin/ folder, add the .exe to your windows firewall or otherwise prevent it from accessing the internet.
Which is why I like tinywall or simplewall -- it uses the windows firewall to block all apps by default.
Hm. I guess if one can reverse the code and sniff the network then one can probably figure out all but the most sophisticated phone home evasion. Just like with cracking games, eventually someone figures it all out. Game crackers will have to add network monitoring to their toolkit if they haven't yet I guess.
I guess the only way to be sure is to not buy those games.
My only issue there is you, as an end user installing these cracks, don't really have a way to be sure it was removed (unless you yourself know the details of and block the phone home). It'll have no effect on you either way, but it'll certainly effect the dev if you miss it; it's only gotta get through once (per install), maybe it tries until it succeeds.
I very much agree with various developers decisions to change engines. I feel for the ones that don't really have that option.
wouldn't a simple firewall block solve that?
Possibly, but can you expect an entire userbase, potentially millions of people, to:
A) know about the problem
B) care enough to do something
And C) know how+be able to apply that block
Especially when there's no effect for end users whether it does or doesn't go through.
A significant portion of players won't bother. Enough that the ones that do don't really matter.
To be clear, I'm specifically taking about pirated versions, which I figure the people using have enough interest in doing to know how or figure out how to do something like that, or even have it disabled at the start by the game crackers.
When I started Pirating games, I was just a young broke kid that wanted to play some games. I didn't know about or even think to look into stuff like this; I just looked for working cracks.
Even now, if I hadn't already known of this, I wouldn't think to look for it.
I'm just saying that, between standard users and pirates, the latter is much more likely to know about and act on something like this. And, like I said, it's also quite likely that the crackers themselves will have a workaround implemented from the start.
Launch the game offline. Which if you’ve ever done with a game made in the last 5 or so years and launching legitamitly, it is increasingly harder to do so.
I take my gaming laptop into work. I can launch older games without an internet connection, but stuff like red dead redemption 2 doesn’t like to start offline – presumably due to telemetry.
Copy-Paste from a reply about blocking the telemetry:
Possibly, but can you expect an entire userbase, potentially millions of people, to:
A) know about the problem
B) care enough to do something
And C) know how+be able to apply that block
Especially when there's no effect for end users whether it does or doesn't go through.
A significant portion of players won't bother. Enough that the ones that do don't really matter.
Apparently, pirating the game can trigger the install tracking and would cost the dev even more
I bet crackers would also null that shit
I think they might actually get told to fuck off by publishers, strictly because they wouldn't be making any money out of it on top of the bad publicity being passed down to them by consumers.
Every major publisher including Trillion dollar Microsoft has Unity engine games in their catalog.
I don't think any of them really want to pay for that. MS would just scoop up Unity before paying that.
I'm talking about the publishers doing it down the road.
EA has been doing this for years. Except they were nearly infinitesimally nicer about it and gave you X installs per key, with the caveat that you had to burn hours on their support line to get it reset.
Probably where that guy got the idea since the Unity CEO was the EA CEO during that online pass era.